In a Rare Initiative, Research & Development Moves to Cloud Computing

Research & development departments are seeking the help of cloud computing for improvement

Industries underpinned by scientific processes like life science and healthcare, oil refining, etc. have been seeing high improvements in recent years, thanks to the evolution of digital technologies. Many labor-intensive processes and calculative works that involved endless requirements are now being moved to cloud computing. Research & development is one such complicated process that is increasingly seeking the help of technology for rapid improvement.

One of the many things that the Covid-19 pandemic has changed over the past one and a half year is the way research & development is conducted. Even though the whole world went into lockdown and businesses were shut for a while, the improvement in research & development was seen as the need of the hour to improve treatments and vaccinations. Life science and healthcare industry was the first industry to move R&D initiatives to cloud computing. Fortunately, many other industries followed the suit. Generally speaking, research & development is a lengthy process. It involves building infrastructure, procuring small developments over a long period of time, and sometimes the cost spent on it is very high. But digital technologies have embarked on a change by minimizing everything. Sophisticated applications in cloud computing can now do a range of bespoke data analysis tasks to help researchers make discoveries. Starting from experiment design and optimization for chemical formulation analysis to safety analysis for chemical manufacturing, everything is possible in the cloud. Henceforth, it is anticipated that even after the pandemic is over and everybody gets on their feet to go to offices, most of the R&D will still function on cloud computing.

Moving R&D to the cloud and its benefits

Today, many businesses are setting up their own research & development centers to enhance their product range and improve the potential. The major upgrade is a unique opportunity for organizations to move out of physical infrastructure. Initially, business companies feared adapting to the sudden change as they thought it would pose configuration risks. They also questioned the security of business-critical data. However, the aging of physical IT infrastructure has made companies choose otherwise.

Meanwhile, physical research & development environments were also losing their place in the market due to various reasons. It faced problems like ballooning data, and availability of services, etc. Especially, critical fields like life science and healthcare had problems in surveying gene regulations, proteomes, and so-called brain atlas projects that demanded high computational power, both in storage capacity and computational capacity. Cloud computing methods emerged as a handy solution to envisage these emerging problems. With the help of disruptive technology, computationally intensive tasks can be made easy through virtual computers, often over the internet. Some of the benefits of moving research & development to cloud are listed as follows.

Endless computing power: When the R&D team is developing a business application, they want more data to test and regulate its long its processes. In a physical environment, getting data means either compromising capacity elsewhere or building incapacity which is only for one-time use. But cloud computing opens a new opportunity by spinning up some dedicated servers when you need them and make the application development easy.

Improves the quantity of the research: Quantity and quality are two important criterias, which a research & development team should take care of, when they are coming up with new products. Some innovations might come out of good quality, but, they could have a problem with the quantity of usage. Henceforth, testing the innovation's capacity by taking its quantity is important. Cloud platform can provide you with resources for this. You can quickly run tests over a variety of platforms and on virtual machines with different specifications.

Reduces environmental impacts: Testing things in the physical world is a risky task. It involves putting the environment on board for the research & development project. But this can be changed with the help of cloud computing as it offers virtualized testing places. You can even host several independent virtual hardware instances that can be used by a number of different projects, or institutions to optimize available CPU capacity.

Cloud-based R&D in life science and healthcare

Research & development in life science and healthcare is a game-changing initiative that will allow the industry to leverage the complete potential of the experimented product or material. It brings efficiencies, allowing enterprise-wide agility, and boosting patient outcomes. Especially, during the Covid-19 pandemic, digital technologies like cloud computing helped a lot in drug and vaccine making. Here are some of the major cloud computing contributed developments in life science and healthcare sector.

• Most of the 213 vaccines in development and 319 potential treatments for the coronavirus were developed over cloud platforms.
• Healthcare entities are maturing in using advanced analytics and machine learning for diagnostic and are sharing real-world evidence for clinical notes, lab reports, pathology images, and radiology scans.
• Over the cloud, bioinformatics is also progressing to analyze coronavirus cells to develop antiviral drugs.