Cloud computing platforms used for research collaborations within public health domains are limited in terms of how service components are organized and provisioned. This challenge is intensified by platform level challenges of transparency, confidentiality, privacy and trust. Addressing these collaboration issues will necessitate that components are reorganized. There is a need for secure and efficient approaches of reorganizing the service components, with trust to support collaboration related requirements. Through iterative design, a reliable and trust-aware re-organization of cloud components – the Collaboration cloud architecture is achieved. We utilize SOA, Privacy-By-Design principles and insights from blockchain to enforce trust. We illustrate its potential with multi-layer security process flow based on server-to-client tokens, Role-based Access Control and the traditional authentication – username and password with assurance for privacy and trust. The architecture shows promise towards data governance and the overall management of internal or external data flows.