Cloud-based Informatics Can Increase Agility, Reduce TCO, Improve Collaboration

Contributed Commentary By Frederic Bost

October 5, 2017 | The move to collaborative research is one of the most fundamental changes occurring in life sciences discovery today. As biopharmaceutical companies engage more and more with each other (and with contract research organizations, research institutes and academic partners), increased operational agility, reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), and improved global collaboration have become important keys to success.

Scientific, Business, and IT Challenges Addressed by the Cloud

Many companies are looking to lower costs and become more productive in operational environments where IT infrastructure is expensive and not viewed as a core competency. Research teams are often tasked with rapidly spinning collaborative projects up and down. As a result of these critical business issues, life science organizations are increasingly taking a cloud-first approach to moving their informatics capabilities to the next level. The cloud accelerates the provisioning of technological infrastructure. It also helps companies roll out new offerings with improved agility and speed—accelerating new therapies to patients.

Some companies are requiring up to 80% reductions in capital and operating budgets in response to economic pressures. As a result, they are exploring cloud computing as a way to lower costs by eliminating up-front capital investments and ongoing maintenance costs associated with on-premises solutions. The cloud eliminates the need for companies to buy, deploy, and maintain IT infrastructure and application software. It is a feasible and attractive strategy for lowering TCO today.

Life scientists have a hard enough time communicating with partners down the hall, let alone with colleagues or partners in different time zones, cultures, languages, and geographies. Highly-paid researchers can spend up to 50% of their time manually checking collaborator data prior to analysis. Errors can go unnoticed for weeks or months, resulting in significant project delays and putting valuable intellectual property (IP) at risk. Externalized projects raise especially important data and project management questions for IT departments. How do they enable networked partners to share project data in real time while also securely partitioning the IP of different parties? How do they ensure that team members can only access what they are authorized to see?

The Upside of the Cloud for Research Informatics

The cloud lets organizations set up a robust collaboration workspace quickly and easily with minimal IT support. The system is available anywhere, anytime—and you only pay for what you use. In a 2016 survey of 1,850 executives and managers, 52% reported having “cloud-first” policies for new technology purchases, an adoption stance that will increase to 77% within the next two years.  

A 2016 IDG survey of IT and business decision makers found that 68% of respondents intend to investigate or deploy cloud analytics solutions over the coming year. Respondents with currently deployed cloud analytics solutions cited the advantages of lower up-front costs (60%) over on-premises solutions. They also cited greater agility and faster time to market (61%), more rapid and cost-effective scaling for large data sets (60%) and improved self-service capabilities for non-technical users (51%).

The RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud Report also demonstrates increased benefits with cloud maturity. For example, faster time to market was cited by approximately 58% of survey respondents with multiple cloud projects deployed, while it was cited by more than 80% of those making heavy use of cloud infrastructure.  

Three Requirements for a Successful Cloud Solution

Life science research organizations investigating cloud feasibility should look for a hosted system that offers strong data safeguards, secure document sharing and a range of extensible scientific applications.

Secure Information Management

In successive RightScale State of the Cloud Report, security has been identified as the #1 challenge of cloud adoption, only dropping to second place in the 2016 report. In 2017 security concerns fell to 25% vs. 29% in 2016. This shift reflects the incremental effort of cloud providers to adopt recognized security standards and build trust in their user communities.

ISO 27001 is one of the most widely recognized and internationally accepted best-practice standards for information security management. Cloud providers should offer ISO accreditation for the systems, technology, processes and data centers supporting their cloud environments. The systems in place to safeguard data need to be certified to an accepted industry standard now and in the future.   

Agile Data and Document Sharing

A successful hosted collaboration system will allow multiple partners to capture and share real-time data and information. For research sponsoring organizations, there is a benefit to keeping this data in the cloud, because there can be a clear delineation between the hosted collaboration system and in-house, server-based systems and data.

Scientific Applications Supporting Defined Needs

A cloud-based research informatics system should support a range of scientific workflows, enabling project team members to access the applications and data they need, wherever they are, at any time. Typical applications include:

• A flexible, multi-disciplinary electronic lab notebook that enables sponsor organizations and network partners to capture and share experimental methods
•  A scientific workflow authoring application supporting scientific services, data harmonization/synchronization, standard business rules and application extensions between hosted and on-premises systems, allowing data to flow from one system to the other
• A mobile application permitting collaborative teams to communicate using mobile devices, easily accessing, searching and sharing real-time project information
• Data analysis and visualization applications providing scientific analysis, data pipelining, visualization and charting capabilities via mobile devices
• An open portal where scientists can publish and share protocols and reports—enhancing broad dissemination of information within the scientific community

By 2020, at least a third of all data will pass through the cloud. More than 43% of organizations expect to deliver the majority of their IT capability through public cloud services by 2020, and they will access 78% of IT resources through some form of cloud by 2018. The numbers speak for themselves. Now is the time for life science organizations to begin defining and implementing an effective cloud strategy to improve agility, reduce costs and support end-to-end collaboration dynamics.