Business & Decision, along with a small number of other Providers have been providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service for some time.
We also said that as far as Software-as-a-Service was concerned, we would see Life Sciences specialist vendors (e.g. LIMS, Quality Management, Learning Management etc) providing compliant Software-as-a-Service solutions - simply because they understand our industry both at the functional level and also at the regulatory level.
We are working with a number of such vendors to deploy their software on our Platform-as-a-Service solutions, leveraging virtualization to provision solutions that are inherently flexible, scalable and - perhaps just as importantly - compliant.
At the same time, we have just started to engineer our first compliant 'Cloud Anywhere' solutions - which allow us to deploy pre-engineered and pre-qualified Platforms (hardware, power, HVAC, storage, virtualization, operating systems, database servers and applications servers) anywhere in the world. This was an idea first developed with Oracle with their Exadata and Exalogic machines (for which Business & Decision developed standard Qualification Packs).
Based upon a wider and more affordable technology base ‘Cloud Anywhere’ allows Business & Decision to leverage our investment in our Quality Management System to provision compliant Private or Community Cloud solutions with the minimum of additional qualification activities. These can be installed on client sites, in third party data centres of in the data centres of our software partners.
As well as deploying the solution, these 'Cloud Anywhere' solutions also come complete with Managed Services from Business & Decision - meaning that clients, partners etc no longer need to worry about the management of the Platform. All of this is taken care of remotely by our own staff (with the exception of local power and network connections of course) and the solutions can also be engineered to automatically failover to a remote Disaster Recovery site.
In the last couple of years we have seen people asking "How long will it be before everything is in the Cloud?", but the reality is that this will never be case in Life Sciences. There will always be Life Sciences companies who need or want some infrastructure on their own sites (because of network latency issues or data integrity issues) and the reality is that we are moving towards a mixed-Model Cloud Environment.
We will see a mixture of non-clouded Infrastructure, Platforms and Software, and various Cloud models, including On-Premise & Off-Premise and Public & Private Clouds.
The coming of age of safe, secure multi-tenanted Software-as-a-Service and the availability of solutions such as 'Cloud Anywhere' means that Life Sciences companies now have the ability to mix'n'match their Cloud environments to meet their specific business needs - and address their regulatory compliance requirements.
It may not seem like it now, but in the next few years we will see these solutions move from leading-edge to mainstream and we will wonder what all the fuss about Cloud was for.
- Qualifying the Cloud: Fact or Fiction?
- Compliant Cloud Computing: Leveraging Infrastructure as a Service
- Compliant Cloud Computing Leveraging Platform as a Service
- Compliant Cloud Computing - Applications and Software as a Service
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment