It was amazing to learn that a well-known hospital in Zurich
has decided that they will never use any form of cloud infrastructure to
compute bioinformatics or biostatistics computations requiring
more-than-desktop-scale computing power. Reason: they are afraid to appear in
the daily newspaper due to data leaking.
While the reason may or may not be a sound one, it is still
very questionable how they arrived at that conclusion. Certainly not by asking
a professional data security engineer or someone who has experience with using
cloud infrastructures.
Most irritating about the decision is that it would also
include a newly established cloud infrastructure by their own university.
Moreover, it is always said to be for reasons of security. I wonder whether it is in terms of the security of a patient that his data is not used for a study relating to his rare disease or - and this is the point here - a novel method of analysing this patient's molecular preposition cannot be run in time, because the place is lacking computational power.
Observing the ever increasing importance of computational power for genomics-based medicine it is only a question of time until the mentioned hospital will fall behind its fellow competitors who have less prejudice towards (new) technologies, such as an SSH tunnel, virtual machines or cloud computing.
Edit a couple of hours later:
Here's an example for a less prejudiced approach towards modern personalized medicine research - https://www.systemsbiology.org/research/cancer-genomics-cloud/
