Why the Cloud is Integral to the Future Success and Evolution of Life Sciences

by Ralf Heineke | Aug 15, 2018 | Blog

How Life Sciences firms use the cloud is changing, as the flexibility and power that comes with cloud services have become increasingly attractive, even to those that had previously been sceptical, explains Ralf Heineke of IBM Cloud

The cloud has ceased to be a new technology – most of us use it in one form or another almost every day, both in our personal and professional lives. Yet the role of the cloud is changing. Where it began life helping to reduce costs, it is now the platform for innovation and business value across most industries.

That’s certainly true of the Life Sciences sector. At IBM we have built a cloud tuned for AI and data – a cloud that learns, adapts and delivers true competitive advantage for Life Sciences. Cognitive is helping pharma companies uncover patterns and improve patient experience by predicting health risks, and it’s also helping with better drug re-purposing and with insights around gene regulation.

Furthermore, the amount of data has exploded over the last few years. Ninety percent of all global data has been generated in the last two years, and 80% of this data is unstructured, such as x-rays, videos and sensor data. Researchers can understand and analyze the data faster than ever – this is all underpinned by cloud services.

The current and future potential of the cloud

In fact, the cloud has evolved such a long way from when it first came to prominence that it is now underpinning almost every element of innovation within Life Sciences. It allows organizations to have much more control and to do things directly and more quickly.

Whether it’s infrastructure, hardware or software, using the cloud means capacity can be scaled up or down almost immediately, organisations can be up and running within days and the lengthy sales cycles and implementation periods of on-premise solutions are a thing of the past.

Test and development environments are available in seconds, capacity is present in the amount the customer needs and the whole test environment can be cancelled each time. Both now and in the future, the cloud has too much potential to ignore, so even organizations that have been slow to adopt cloud services are now thinking how best they can approach this.

IBM cloud and AMPLEXOR Life Sciences

There are many options available for organizations wishing to use the cloud of course, and we are proud that AMPLEXOR Life Sciences has chosen to use IBM cloud to provide many of its services. We want to work with the most innovative companies, and AMPLEXOR certainly falls into that category – this is why we believe IBM Cloud is the right basis for AMPLEXOR’s Life Science solutions.

A range of deployment options – users can choose between public, dedicated and private cloud options. With the dedicated option, organisations’ virtual environments are on their own server, completely separated for the customer. Also, those services are deployed in a single tenant mode.

The private cloud option means that when using IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service, an organization can also them in their own data center. Furthermore, they shift workloads between the three options to suit their own specific needs – flexibility that is highly useful within life sciences.

Powerful infrastructure – at the infrastructure level, there is the choice between virtual servers and also bare metal servers, which are implemented in the IBM cloud and allow users to benefit from the advance computing power of bare metal. These can even be configured as they would be in an organisation’s own data center.

Low latency network – with 60 data centers all around the world, all connected together with their own network, users are able to share information between data centers, at no charge, high speed and low latency. Given the increasingly global nature of Life Sciences, another compelling reason to use the cloud.

We also take our data responsibility very seriously at IBM. We recognize that data is the life blood of any organization, arguably even more so with Life Sciences firms, and we are fully committed to protecting the privacy of our clients’ data.

For our data centers in the EU, we have rolled-out new controls to ensure access to client content (including client personal data and special personal data) is restricted to and controlled by EU-based IBM employees only. For dedicated instances, we go further – clients can review and approve all non-EU access requests to their content if an instance requires support or access from a non-EU based employee. If granted, this access is temporary, and the client will be notified when the temporary access is revoked.

The cloud is a key part of the future infrastructure within Life Sciences, especially with more and more Life Sciences firms using AI in their processes. I am sure a number of you are already using the cloud and are thinking of expanding that deployment. However, if you have questions or want more information, contact AMPLEXOR.

Last Updated: 15/08/2018

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Ralf Heineke

Ralf Heineke

Partner Sales Manager, IBM Cloud

About the author

Ralf Heineke is Partner Sales Manager for IBM Cloud. He is responsible for the Cloud channel business in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and has a long and varied experience in the cloud business, supporting ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) like Amplexor, System integrators and Resellers.