Pfizer and Indigo Discuss Shared Services on ALA 2010 Informatics Panel
I served on a panel in the informatics track at the Lab Automation Conference last week with people from Pfizer. We were each allowed a couple of slides to do an introduction to a key point. My slides are attached to this post. The interesting thing to me was how aligned Indigo and the Pfizer scientists were on the use of shared services to improve productivity in research. The idea expressed on the panel was that we can make our relationships with collaborators much richer by making data “location transparent” and the computational resources needed to process them “elastic”. These are the two main promises of so-called cloud computing infrastructures. They key is to encrypt everything in the shared service using security standards developed by other industries to ensure data protection while gaining the ‘elasticity’ and ‘location transparency’ by allowing selective access to data to those who need it.
The key idea expressed by the audience was that data security is the top concern of research organizations considering or using shared infrastructure. I was delighted that there was strong agreement between Indigo and Pfizer on how to solve this problem and that the benefits would be an increase in productivity for everyone.
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