What comes to mind when you hear the word “cloud”? Does the Amazon cloud immediately pop into your head?
Despite the cloud’s widespread recognition in the media, many are still uncertain about the benefits of cloud computing. In a recent national survey, 95% of respondents who claimed they have never used the cloud actually have. In fact, they do so unwittingly nearly everyday via online banking and shopping, social networking, emailing etc.
Some scientists still seem skeptical of the cloud’s place in next-generation sequencing. If you tend to gravitate to skepticism, please read my article, Dispelling the Myths of the Cloud for the Skeptical Scientist, on BitesizeBio.com.
It provides an overview of how the cloud can be useful to scientists in a multitude of ways, such as infinite scalability, enabling instant and limitless access to storage and compute resources, eliminating up-front commitment to expensive hardware. Another advantage, Data security, is the cloud’s core competency, which cannot be measured up to any other internal infrastructure.
The “cloud” may be generating a lot of buzz in the NGS community, but is it worthy of all the hype? It appears that all signs point to yes.
