​STFC's data usually come from big instruments which generate a lot of data. Because the instruments are large and valuable, they tend to have a lifetime of several decades. The data from these facilities needs to be collected and preserved, analysed, and then stored and preserved for the lifetime of the facility.

SCD manages this data for STFC instruments, as well as other large facilities and projects, including Diamond Light Source and the Large Hadron Collider, as well as for climate, supercomputing and astronomy research.

​This sort of big data requires big solutions. The department provides high performance computing services to the science community in the form of easily accessible, high velocity and volume storage, working across different research areas with different tools, data formats and cultures.