| Build it yourself | TrustBoxx | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first researcher | Weeks to months, depending on your team's cloud experience | About two days to deploy, then data loading and onboarding |
| Skills you need | Cloud networking, identity, security hardening, monitoring and infrastructure-as-code | None in-house. Researchers do research. |
| Output checking | Usually a manual process you design and run yourself | Built-in workflow with automated disclosure checks and external approval |
| Audit trail | You choose, deploy and maintain the logging stack | Activity logging, alerting and an insert-only egress log included |
| Ongoing operations | Patching, upgrades, backups, incidents and on-call are yours | Run by Techvito as part of the managed service |
| Evidence for custodians | You write the policies and assessment | SATRE self-assessment, policies and architecture documentation provided |
| Cost profile | Low software cost, high and unpredictable staff cost | Fixed setup and monthly fee, plus transparent cloud usage |
| Control | Full control of every design choice | Dedicated single-tenant environment, configured to your project |
The cost most people miss
The software is rarely the expensive part. In the DARE UK 2025 landscape review, staff made up more than half of annual costs for 63% of UK TRE organisations. A TRE needs people who understand cloud security to keep it safe every month, not just at launch.
When building your own makes sense
- You already have an experienced cloud and security team with spare capacity
- You need deep customisation that no managed service offers
- You are building a large, long-lived national or institutional platform
When TrustBoxx makes sense
- You are a small or mid-sized research team with no DevOps capability
- You have a project or grant with a start date
- You tried an open-source TRE and got stuck
- You would rather spend your budget on research than infrastructure
Not sure which side you're on? Take the TRE readiness check. It takes two minutes.