Do you know that, thanks to the Cloud Computing, We can do things that we had never imagined? If in other articles in this blog we talked about the benefits of the Cloud in online booking, On this occasion we will show 3 cases in which Cloud platforms can change science and business as we know it.
1. Sequencing the human genome to detect disease
Every day we can see in the media new steps aimed at curing diseases such as cancer. In the future, one of the keys to gaining a better understanding of this type of ailment is precisely the Cloud, as Eric Dishman explained in BBC World.
Dishman founded the technology giant Intel's first research and innovation lab in 1999, and has been a founding member of his own «digital health» group since 2005. When he was 19, he was diagnosed with a rare form of kidney cancer. From then on, and for 23 years, he underwent dozens of trial-and-error treatments.
The turning point came when a technology company offered him the opportunity to sequencing its genome. This helped the experts to identify which gene caused his cancer and to decide which drugs were most effective for his particular case. Dishman told BBC Mundo: “My doctors hadn't done anything with genome sequencing; when they did, they saw that the 92% drugs I had taken were never going to work.
The doctors needed 3 months to analyze their genome sequence, and another 4 months to compare their genomic results with those of patients with a similar profile who had been treated in numerous hospitals in the United States.
Dishman wanted to accelerate the process, so he helped found the Collaborative Cancer Cloud (CCC), an initiative launched by Intel and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) last year. The goal of the CCC is precisely to make it possible for hospitals and research institutions to share patients' genomes and clinical information anonymously and securely.
According to Dishman, it's about using the cloud in a different way: «Globally, the major cancer research centers pool their information and generate a small cloud that people can access to study the disease. That's great, but the problem is that only 4% of the information is available.”.
The goal of the CCC is to make the remaining 96% of information available to hospitals and research centers so that they can analyze how individuals who share a genomic pattern reacted to certain treatments. The platform can be used to investigate a variety of diseases, from cancer to muscular dystrophy.
2. Develop a private cloud to build spacecraft.
As we were able to read a few days ago in the Byte Magazine, Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Cloud Suite and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, which helps bridge the gap between development and operations teams in the cloud computing environment.
In this regard, Red Hat has taken a big step toward private cloud implementation. According to a Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2016 study, conducted among the company's customers around the world, private cloud deployments will be 6 times more important than the public cloud.
What does this have to do with spacecraft? Very simple: According to the portal Silicon, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at NASA has developed a private cloud based on Red Hat OpenStack which will modernize the storage and capacity of its data center.
The laboratory, which is dedicated to the construction and development of special unmanned spacecraft, JPL, bases a large part of its space missions on cloud computing capabilities due to the immense data streams they handle for each project. Until now, most of JPL's infrastructure has been hosted on an on-site server, so moving to the private cloud will offer significant advances in terms of flexibility and cloud computing capacity.
3. Avoiding fraud in financial institutions
According to the BBC, 9 out of 10 financial institutions have, at least, an application in the cloud. If we consider that in 2009 only 57% of these institutions were using cloud services, we can see how important it is today.
In addition, many of the new financial technology-based startups are building their new business models on 3 of the largest cloud platforms on the market - Amazon web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. A good example is the Norwegian startup Auka, which has developed the first mobile payments platform powered exclusively by Google Cloud.
Another company that is betting on cloud platforms is Salesforce, which today allows banks to offer personalized financial advice through any device, without involving a large investment.
We see, then, that the financial sector is opting for the cloud, mainly because of the cost reduction that this entails. Another advantage is the speed with which such a solution can be implemented, often in a matter of a few months or even minutes.
But the great advance that the cloud has brought about in financial matters is the fight against fraud. Obviously, one of the main concerns of financial institutions is the security of customer data and the prevention of fraud. In this regard, the use of cloud platforms from large companies (such as Amazon and Microsoft) reduces the need for human involvement in processes, which reduces the risk of fraud by 70%.
Banking fraud may decrease considerably in the coming years, which will also mean less human labor and therefore an overall change in terms of jobs.