Healthcare and life sciences is a vertical that can gain tremendously from technological paradigm shifts such as cloud computing. Despite obvious deterrents in the form of data security and privacy, HIPPA, and the sheer volume of unstructured data in terms of storage, management, analytics and research, there is no dearth of opportunity for innovators and entrepreneurs who are looking to overcome challenges and create solutions to benefit not only the medicos but also researchers dealing with complex life science scenarios.

Cloud computing forerunners such as Amazon and Microsoft have been active in this vertical long before the term cloud computing became popular. IBM backed genomic research and Intel supported Dossia; both are are examples of companies and consortia which have successfully brought some of the high performance grid use cases into the cloud fold to take advantage of the elasticity, on-demand model, and the cost-effective information technology offered by cloud computing.

MORE >>