Cloud Computing for Biomedical Information Management

Biomedical informatics community shares data and applications, can take advantage of a new resource called “cloud computing”. Clouds generally offer resources on demand. In most clouds, charges are pay per use, based on large farms of inexpensive, dedicated servers, sometimes supporting parallel computing. When clouds are used for biomedical information management, it costs much lower than dedicated laboratory systems or even institutional data centers. Biomedical applications that are not I/O intensive and do not demand a fully mature environment can use clouds which has major technological improvements. Instead of listing the strengths and weaknesses of cloud-based systems (e.g., for security or data preservation), this paper reviews the changes from individual lab systems to a grid and cloud based environment for Biomedical Informatics. Many observers believe that clouds represent the next generation of computing paradigm for biomedical application.