Cloud efficiency gains in the healthcare industry

Over at NPR, there is an article which explains how cloud computing can vastly improve efficiency when searching for new drugs and treatments. Hospitals and pharmaceutical companies can rent the required amount of processing power for tasks, rather than investing in supercomputers on site, which would only be used sporadically.

One customer needed to virtually screen 21 million chemical compounds, which in the past was done on site, and would have cost millions of dollars and taken years to set up. However, by renting the processing power in the cloud, it only cost $15,000 and took 3 hours.

The efficiency savings from using the cloud, rather than on-premise systems can be vast, and in the context of the healthcare industry, this time and money saved has a direct impact on the quality of the service offered – not only in the money saved, but also the work achieved in screening the chemicals, which took half a day, rather than years.

Furthermore, pharmaceutical research can also be shared in the cloud, to make collaboration in research and development faster and easier. This benefits consumers, as well as businesses.

Read the full article here.