Blog
Notes from the lab bench
Writing on data sovereignty, accreditation, and what it actually takes to run a compliant laboratory without handing your records to someone else’s cloud.
- Data sovereigntyIndustry trends
Data sovereignty is becoming the industry's default constraint
Data residency isn't a niche compliance concern anymore — it's the backdrop every lab, funder and regulator across the industry is now building around.
Read more - ProductSamples
From sample intake to exportable dataset: how the pipeline works
A walk through what actually happens between logging a sample and handing an assessor a dataset — workflows, bulk import, file attachments, and generated extracts.
Read more - Industry trendsAccreditation
A growing lab market doesn't lower the bar — it raises it
More laboratories chasing accreditation doesn't make accreditation easier to get. It's exactly why boards and funders keep tightening what counts as evidence.
Read more - Data sovereigntyISO/IEC 17025
Self-hosted is a compliance requirement, not a preference
For a testing lab pursuing ISO/IEC 17025, where the data lives isn't an IT decision — it's often the thing that disqualifies a cloud ELN before an assessor ever looks at the audit trail.
Read more - Audit trailSecurity
What makes an audit trail actually tamper-evident
Most ELNs will tell you they log every change. That's a different claim from tamper-evident, and the gap between them is exactly what an assessor is trained to probe.
Read more - Buying guidePricing
Why “elabFTW is free” is the wrong question
The honest answer to “why would we pay for this” isn't a feature comparison — it's that free and paid solve different problems, and most labs don't need the paid one yet.
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