LABORATORY INFORMATICS
you feel more secure, so some people might have anxiety about having their data reside somewhere. ‘Cloud provides much more robust
security but at the same time, there is a shared responsibility model so anything that is in the cloud is still the responsibility of the customer. In the case of managed services, that would be us as Digital Science. The security of the cloud is the responsibility of the cloud providers, and they address and take care of a lot of the low-level infrastructure and security so we, as customers, do not have to spend time and money managing security at the lower levels of the software stack,’ Shrestha added. Trish Meek, director of marketing at Thermo Fisher Scientific, agrees that perception is the main stumbling block. ‘Having been in the LIMS industry for 20 years, there was a time when there was, particularly in the manufacturing space, this perception that “if I have a system behind my firewalls, that is the safest location”. ‘There have been so many breaches of people’s own infrastructures that there is now an understanding from the IT community. Due to the economies of scale, and because Amazon has so much time and resources to invest into security
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”The apps are pre- configured workflows, so the advantage is that these are implementation accelerators”
in a way that a single petrochemical company or pharmaceutical company cannot. They are now looking to providers like Amazon and saying “this is your core business so we would like to leverage those capabilities, rather than building the same level of cybersecurity in-house”,’ added Meek. She also noted that while Thermo
chooses to deploy the managed systems using AWS, there is no technical limitation that prevents a customer from deploying their software on another cloud platform. Shrestha said: ‘We are building our
applications to be cloud-agnostic. They can take our software and deploy it on- premise, or using the cloud vendor of their choice. We have multiple tiers in our offering, we have the infrastructure at the very bottom, and on top of that we have the platform which supports additional products. The platforms themselves can also support additional specific
workflows, which are available in the form of apps which cater to specific workloads, such as life sciences or NGS and data analytics.
Developing a platform for science Thermo offers a number of different software tools which are fine-tuned to the type of laboratory work that is going to be run on the system. Academic users or R&D organisations may choose Platform for Science, while users in manufacturing or other regulated industries would be more suited to Sample Manager. ‘We acquired Core Informatics in 2017,
largely because of their advanced cloud capabilities. They had taken a cloud- native approach and built up the technical operations support and managed cloud deployments, so that was part of that acquisition strategy,’ said Meek. ‘We still have our traditional products in Sample Manager and Watson that lots of our customers are using in regulated spaces. I would say that the distinction is that Platform for Science is an R&D solution, so that applies to academia, as well as pharmaceutical industries, and Sample Manager continues to be our manufacturing solution designed for GLP environments – for those customers that are regulated,’ she continued.
February/March 2020 Scientific Computing World 11
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