Amazon Cloud Helping Healthcare Researchers

Healthcare generates nearly unprecedented amounts of data, leaving researchers to wade in hopes of extracting a needle from a haystack. Previously, data volume outpaced the ability to process it, but Amazon Cloud is hoping to change all that. Specifically, the company recently launched Amazon Omics for general availability.

With the service, researchers will be able to store and analyze omic data. Examples include DNA, RNA, and other proteins. It supports researchers by providing the infrastructure needed for large health data volumes. This should allow more time for finding insights and creating new solutions for pressing healthcare challenges.

Because the vast majority of health data is unstructured, most of it goes unused thanks to a lack of infrastructure for processing and cleaning this type of data. AWS hopes to change that for researchers and shorten the time between scientific discoveries.

See also: NVIDIA Launches Medical AI Computing Platform

The omics suite includes multiple functionalities

Amazon Omics aids researchers in multiple ways:

• Omics-aware object storage: Helps researchers store raw sequence data as well as share it
• Omics workflow: Runs workflows at scale
• Omics analytics: Simplifies the output of any given sequence processing task

The current version has been under beta testing for a while, but now, researchers across the globe can leverage it to streamline medical research and finally make sense of big medical data. Amazon Omics removes the need for researchers to build and maintain their own infrastructure and make productive use of available data.

It’s expected to foster collaboration between large research groups and smaller clinical groups, among other medical communities. It creates an ecosystem of collaborative tools that could help communities as they strive to overcome healthcare challenges and provide care to a growing global population.

And for those worried about privacy, AWS uses more than 300 security and compliance services and supports almost 100 different security standards and compliance certifications. It will also provide a best-practice encryption tool. It’s designed to go beyond gathering data to finally making sense of it all.