LABORATORY INFORMATICS GUIDE 2014 | MOBILE ANALYSIS
do, and it is going to take a month or more using your single server that you have sitting in your lab, you can certainly leverage SaaS infrastructure.’ He continued: ‘Just set up 30 instances, instead of your single instance: you get your results much faster and it doesn’t cost you anymore because you’re only running it for a fraction of the time and you only pay for what you use.’
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view the overall output and you can zoom in to view all the original peaks.’ He pointed out: ‘Frequently, you can have a situation where there is a very visible artefact at the gross level, which is actually just noise from the instrument, and then when you zoom in you actually see what you wanted to see – which may be in a totally different place. The pdf won’t show that type of thing.’ When implemented for mobile devices as
well as traditional workstations, the software does not require the scientist to be in the laboratory. Now this review can be done anywhere as long as the device being used is connected to the internet and thus a web- based client. The device can also be notified when the instrument is finished with the experiment.
THE RISKS OF MOBILE DEVICES The integration of mobile devices has risks, mainly those associated with the loss of a company’s data, but this has not stopped the adoption of the technology. This is because many of these risks have been associated with similar devices used by company personnel for a number of years. Mac Conaonaigh points out: ‘There is still a risk with mobile devices, but there has been for a long time with laptops anyway.’ He went on to say: ‘You can sandbox anything that’s to do with the enterprise, and if the device is lost or stolen then the IT organisation within the enterprise can remotely wipe that’. With the ability to remotely wipe sensitive
data from mobile devices, the perceived risks can actually work as an advantage. Ward stressed this aspect: ‘If you can have this all
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operating on a simple device that is relatively cheap, and you put your money into the server that’s actually doing the analysis, you have essentially got the analysis occurring in an environment that you as a business, paying for it, have much more control over.’
BUDGETARY CONTROLS (SAAS) Some data can be dealt with over mobile devices, but large data sets are becoming more frequent and their analysis presents particular problems, especially for smaller companies. This issue has led to the development of a second technology trend in the informatics field. SaaS is an exciting prospect for many smaller companies as it can provide a high level of computing power for the analysis of large data sets, on a ‘pay as you go’ basis. This removes the financial burden of installing large data-centres. Ward explains: ‘I think the attraction on paper for many organisations to move to a SaaS model is budgetary control, in so much as “I don’t have to think now about setting up the infrastructure, buying servers, maintaining the servers, dealing with upgrades” so there are clearly potential cost-savings from just management of those kind of complex systems.’ Although the main advantage for
companies using SaaS may be the management of the IT infrastructure, there are other advantages to using the model, such as being able to access large amounts of computing power at times when the workload for analysis increases. Mac Conaonaigh gives an example: ‘So if you’re in a situation where you have a huge amount of analysis to
COLLABORATION INFRASTRUCTURE (SAAS) The case for SaaS is not restricted to just budgetary control, however. Its other advantage is as a collaboration infrastructure. It provides a tool for companies to share information in a safe environment without IP concerns classically associated with moving sensitive information outside the firewall, or allowing people from outside the organisation to access information inside the firewall for a particular collaboration project. Weiss outlined the concerns he has
experienced from customers with existing collaboration methods: ‘We can create a space in your system and give your collaborators access to it. You open up the firewall and the ports – and that kind of makes them (customers) nervous.’ He explained why the SaaS model was such an attractive
Some data can be dealt with
over mobile devices, but large data sets are becoming more
frequent and their analysis presents particular problems
proposition especially for sensitive industries like pharmaceuticals: ‘The ability to spin up these open public spaces that are managed by your vendor, that allow people to safely collaborate and share content, but also allow you to extract that content back into your own infrastructure when you see fit.’ Dotmatics’ Gallagher has experienced
similar requests for SaaS to promote innovative collaboration. He said: ‘We have seen a trend whereby many large pharma and chemical organisations with important internal IT infrastructure, chose to extend it with SaaS systems that enable them to work seamlessly with collaborators across the world.’ He added: ‘Not only does the SaaS model
provide a safe framework to exchange data between organisations, but it enables true collaborative research with real-time knowledge sharing between researchers.’ l
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