Introduction to Verily Workbench

What is Verily Workbench?

Workbench is a secure research environment for governing and analyzing multimodal biomedical data. Verily develops and operates Workbench to connect researchers to scientifically important data, enabling secure scalable collaborative analysis. We are transforming drug discovery and development by powering the lifecycle of data that is governed, research that is reproducible, and collaboration that is easy and secure – all using organizations’ choice of infrastructure from one or more clouds.

Verily designed Workbench based on years of experience enabling important scientific initiatives like the Accelerating Medicines Partnership Parkinson’s Disease (AMP PD) and the National Institutes of Health All of Us Research Program, an ambitious effort to build the largest, most diverse healthcare database of its kind. Workbench has also been used by commercial data generators and pharmaceutical companies, and leverages our active contributions to health and data standards like the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health.

Workbench includes an enterprise-focused Web UI and a set of software services (i.e. a control plane) that are independently operated by Verily with native support for multiple public clouds. Workbench Information security is reviewed by security teams at Verily and Google, audited by third-parties, and compliant with ISO 27001 and SOC2.

What is Verily Workbench used for?

We built Verily Workbench to help organizations accelerate their scientific research initiatives. Our customers use Verily Workbench to discover and develop drugs, run multi-omic workflows, visualize cellular data, analyze clinical and other digital health data, and develop and apply machine learning/AI models.

Analysis workspaces including python notebooks and R code can be shared securely with collaborators inside and outside an organization with Workbench. Workbench allows for access to an organized catalog of cloud-native services (e.g., BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, AWS SageMaker, Visual Studio Code), in addition to allowing for browsing, querying, and downloading files and tables, and accessing associated materials generated by Verily, such as data dictionaries, sample analyses, quality reports, and other artifacts.

To support the next generation of scientific research on the cloud, Verily Workbench provides the following capabilities:

Dynamic data governance

• Policy as code: Terms that govern data use are incorporated on-demand into secure analysis environments
• Global dataset ready: Controls based on geographic regions are factored into the policy framework
• Connected systems: Flexible integrations can link internal governance processes enabling co-analysis of public, commercial, and internal proprietary data.

Enterprise integrations

• Custom authentication providers, e.g. Auth0, Azure AD
• Flexible deployment models, e.g. multi-tenant SaaS, private instances
• Upstream and downstream data sources, e.g. lab management, data catalogs
• Internal source code systems and tool registries, e.g. GitHub for Enterprise, Docker
• Compliant with industry standards, e.g. ISO 27001 / SOC 2, NIST 800.53

App extensibility

• Built-in support for generic and domain-specific multi-modal data tools, e.g. Integrative Genomic Viewer (IGV), JupyterLab
• Integration with cloud-native analysis tools, e.g. Vertex AI, SageMaker, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Dataproc, Visual Studio Code
• Integration with multiple workflow engines, e.g. Nextflow, Cromwell