Decreasing costs, and rapid technological innovation, have resulted in a tremendous increase in the volume of biological data being generated. At the same time, operations in life sciences organizations are becoming increasingly collaborative and complex. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a complete set of easy to use, flexible tools to help your company address these problems, including solutions for drug discovery, product development, supply chain management, and marketing and sales.
Compute-intensive science can take advantage of the full breadth of AWS services, including those specifically designed for high-performance computing (HPC). You can optimize based on memory, compute, or graphics, or somewhere in between, allowing you to design applications in a wide range of fields, including biological simulations and computational chemistry.
Supply chain management in the pharmaceutical industry can benefit from Big Data applications built using Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), a Hadoop framework that runs on AWS and that can dramatically speed up data processing for large data sets.
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AWS can equip pharmaceutical companies with new analytical capabilities while also giving you new ways for your brand to reach patients and physicians. You can combine data from disparate sources using services like Amazon Redshift, and quickly scale up and down your campaigns using services like AWS Auto Scaling.
AWS can lower your IT costs in the short-term, and long-term, compared to an on-premises solution. In addition, AWS offers pay-as-you go pricing, which is well-suited for research projects that have a defined beginning and end. You can assemble a high-performance computing cluster, run your simulation, and then release your resources, while only paying for the time you were using the cluster.
The AWS cloud is being used in a wide range of companies in the healthcare and life sciences industry. AWS has provided benefits for both start-ups as well as well-established companies like General Electric and Pfizer since 2006, and can add value for applications you plan on migrating to the cloud, or enable the delivery of entirely new applications in your organization.
AWS has a broad range of services that have applications throughout the life sciences value chain. You can use services like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to simulate clinical trials in the development phase, or use services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to backup your lab results. AWS also provides many benefits to common IT workloads like email, database, ERP.
The security features in the AWS Cloud are built to help keep your data safe and protect your intellectual property (IP). Your data is secured by a firewall by default. Data can be encrypted while in transit or at rest, with encryption keys you can store yourself or with AWS. You always retain ownership of your IP and content, and AWS does not have access to your data.
Visit the AWS Security Center for a full listing of security features »
The AWS environment is designed to give you the ability to follow a broad range of international security and data protection standards. If your R&D organization is running projects that use protected health information (as defined under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)), AWS can sign Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) and provide the technical infrastructure to ensure you have the ability to meet your statutory privacy requirements.
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