LABORATORY INFORMATICS GUIDE 2015 | THE CLOUD
THE CLOUDS ARE ROLLING IN
Robert Roe investigates cloud and SaaS deployment models and the inherent flexibility and scalability they provide to users
A
lthough security concerns exist, some vendors believe that concerns have been overplayed, and that the
cloud is an inevitability that must be embraced in order to reduce costs and increase the functionality of existing informatics products. According to Anthony Uzzo, president of
Core Informatics: ‘Within due time everyone will be in the cloud; some will adopt the cloud at a faster pace than others, but we need look no further than the CIA, here in the United States, which has just invested $740 million in an Amazon web services deployment. The agency obviously feels pretty confident about the security practices that are in place for Amazon web services, and I think that is a very strong testament to what Amazon has done – they take security very seriously and we are seeing many other businesses follow suit.’ Core informatics provides a cloud-based
platform, delivering LIMS, ELN and SDMS products and a marketplace for pre-built applications to customise the service further through cloud deployment using Amazon Web Services. Karen Madden, president of informatics at
Perkin Elmer, believes it is happening already: ‘Our customers are embracing the cloud. If you look across the industry, some have been relatively slow to adopt the cloud, but it is happening. Our customers are moving there and working now with systems that are almost entirely cloud-based. We see that trend accelerating not decelerating.’ Paul Denny-Gouldson, head of strategic
solutions at IDBS, said: ‘The cloud is absolutely inevitable and the sooner people wake up to that mind-set, rather than just putting up the roadblocks and saying “security is an issue, no we can’t do it”, the better. They are going to have to do this eventually, so they need to understand what those security implications are and what can be done to manage that risk.’ Perkin Elmer has developed its Elements ELN platform with cloud capabilities,
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but unlike Core Informatics it sees the conventional product and its cloud-based equivalent as two distinct products. Madden said: ‘Elements really extends the capability for our core franchise enterprise ELN. We are viewing the product as two distinct products that address different markets and different types of customers, but the two are complementary to each other.’ Madden continued: ‘We are trying to give
our customers flexibility, especially for our large enterprise customers, in terms of moving some of their data to the cloud to promote or enhance some of their collaborative activities – especially our large pharma customers who are doing externalisation of their R&D and working a lot more with CROs around the world.’ Madden concluded: ‘Just like with Elements,
we are looking at offering and developing a lot of complementary products that are going to be cloud based. We recognise the importance of the cloud, all the features and the benefits of what the cloud has to offer.’ Core Informatics was an early adopter of
cloud models for its products, and because of this it has a series of products delivered through the cloud that are already available today. Uzzo said: ‘Our platform is unlike
The cloud is absolutely inevitable and the sooner people wake up to that mind-set, the better
many of the other products in the market. We deliver a platform of technology that enables our customers to manage any of their data from our suite of LIMS, ELN, and SDMS products, but also to access a library of applications built by Core Informatics and our partners to quickly extend the solution. In addition to this, our system has a very robust API that empowers our customers to build their own apps on top of the platform that is already available.’
One of the primary advantages with cloud-
based informatics is the speed of deployment for a new solution and the scalability that cloud deployments provide. This allows users to quickly adapt to the shifting nature of workloads, by paying only for the amount of compute that the company needs at any one time. Uzzo said: ‘Our customers in the cloud
have access to an instance of our product within 24 hours of coming on board with Core Informatics, though that is typically a testing environment to facilitate their training. Nevertheless, they are quickly onto the platform, at which point they can immediately begin to access the library of applications in the marketplace or configure and add-on application functionality on-top of the platform.’ Denny-Gouldson explained that IDBS has been providing some services through cloud providers within its healthcare environment. He said: ‘We were hosting an environment for patient data, analytics, and aggregation, linking it with omics data and all sorts of stuff like that.’
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