The Paperless Lab Academy celebrated in Amsterdam in May 2014 discussed over three main questions  for a laboratory of the industry. The first was whether paperless laboratories do better science, and the second was dedicated to analysing the implications of the Cloud for the traditional informatics vendors, as Tom Wilkie (chief editor Scientific Computing World) reports in his second of three articles summarising the 2014 edition.

Implications of Cloud services for lab informatics

The PLA2014 has offered a vision of a future lab in which expensive stand-alone informatics systems are being replaced by software as a service (SaaS). This shift from corporate, in-house, closed, research to outsourced and networked research and data management in the pharmaceutical industry has profound implications regarding patenting, confidentiality and admissibility of evidence. On the other hand, due to the fact that this is also a highly-regulated industry, pharmaceutical companies need to demonstrate that every piece of data has been checked and verified and that there is a solid audit trail to prevent falsification, as Tom Wilkie reports.

A dark Cloud for traditional lab informatics vendors?

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