Case Study: Dalhousie University achieves secure, scalable remote health data access and faster analytics with Cloudera

Health Data Nova Scotia Managing data in the private cloud enables remote access to health data and analytics for academic research

Dalhousie University’s Health Data Nova Scotia (HDNS) provides secure, de‑identified health data to researchers across Atlantic Canada but struggled with on‑site servers that couldn’t scale, were cumbersome to manage, and limited remote and multi‑jurisdictional access. HDNS needed a secure, searchable, and scalable enterprise platform to support diverse research projects, protect patient privacy, and deliver analytics to both internal staff and external researchers.

HDNS migrated to a private‑cloud deployment of Cloudera Data Platform with Cloudera Professional Services, gaining a future‑proof architecture that delivers secure remote access, centralized analysis across provinces, and support for SAS, Python, R and machine learning. The new platform improved reliability and processing speed, enabled exponential growth in remote users, streamlined researcher workflows, and shortened time to value while maintaining strong data security and provincial compliance.

Dalhousie University

Samuel Stewart

Director