Cloud now?

At the CHI NGS conference,  I chaired a roundtable of key managers and influencers discussing the opportunity and challenges to adoption of “cloud computing” for NGS applications. As a first observation, the session was well attended and people are thinking deeply about cloud issues.  About 16 participated including representatives from major pharmaceuticals, agroscience, major medical research core labs, and the NIH.

Here is a transcript of my notes from the roundtable:

1. Some felt end-users increasingly accept the privacy of their data in the hands of a secure cloud provider. Others remarked it remains uncomfortable for some end users who worry when they “don’t know where their data lives”. The roundtable agreed that more end-user education is needed.
2. Data transfer from the location of data generation to where it is processed remains a bottleneck. However, the problem is more on the upload side since cloud providers tend to have unlimited bandwidth. Corporate and Institution wide networks will have to improve to remedy this bottleneck.
3. Software application providers will have to develop metering metrics for licensing their applications on cloud resources that can be de-commissioned.
4. Cloud resources should allow for moving data between desktop applications and the centralized resources.
5. Commissioning and de-commissioning fixed resources such as databases can be an issue.
6. From a clinical applicability perspective, cloud providers (and those who run applications on cloud resources) will have to consider how to make their solution suitable for regulatory approval and auditing.
7. Finally, if an application provider such as GenomeQuest uses a commercial cloud provider such as Amazon EC2, the participants agreed that the application provider and not Amazon is accountable for the security, privacy, and over all robustness of the IT.

My takeaways? Cloud computing is becoming viable in the minds of the industry. A few solvable roadblocks remain. With infinite computing and infinite data, managing the data and turning it into insight remains the challenge and the opportunity.