What are the advantages of cloud-based drug discovery software?

We recently published a case study with Amazon Web Services, detailing how we were able to scale our StarDrop platform in a cloud environment, to bring security and flexibility to StarDrop users.

Using AWS, we can make StarDrop available to customers 24/7/365

Ian Smith, Chief Technology Officer, Optibrium

You can read the full case study on the AWS website. Alternatively, find out more about this partnership, the advantages of cloud-based drug discovery for our users and how Optibrium is ensuring data security for our discovery platforms in our interview with Ian (transcript below).

Ian Smith, CTO, shares details on cloud-based drug discovery and the transformation of StarDrop’s deployment options with AWS.

Tell us more about this project to build cloud-based drug discovery platform

So, as many of our customers are probably aware, StarDrop has a desktop application that’s been in the marketplace now for about 14 years. Feedback from customers showed that we needed to rethink the way that we offer the deployment of our products.

One of the questions we get a lot is, “Can we deploy StarDrop through a web application?” Because web applications are much easier for users to deploy than desktop applications. Some of our larger customers have to go through very large initiatives and projects to deploy software. Their security and compliance checks involve a lot of time and resource constraints. These time and resource constraints are also known as the total cost of ownership, which includes things like infrastructure as well as deployment.

We started looking at options to put StarDrop through a web application. We were really interested in making sure that the desktop experience remained, and conscious of the fact that many web applications don’t always offer the same user experience as a desktop tool.

Virtualisation became a really interesting use case for us. We looked at many products, and Amazon’s AppStream was the one that came out on top. This was predominantly because of the way it works. It just transmits pixels, so there’s no lag; it’s real-time. And with modern browsers these days, you can actually create desktop modes or even look like a desktop application on people’s machines.

We did a couple of proof of concepts. Realised that AppStream was a significant opportunity for us as a business. And what we did then was partner with AWS, to make it real. And here we are six months later. The speed to market was incredible. Amazon was a fantastic partner. And because the product was so easy to use and configure, we were able to really get up and going very quickly. And here we are.

What benefits are there to cloud-based discovery software?

Two things really: security and flexibility. With StarDrop in the cloud now we can offer our customer several deployment options.

As a customer of ours, you can still use StarDrop as a desktop application that runs on Windows or Mac. And if you wish, you can host some of our server services on your own server in your own environment. With StarDrop in the cloud, we can augment that deployment option. We can offer you a full cloud experience, and give you the StarDrop client and StarDrop server services fully in the cloud if you wish. In this case, you don’t need to have any infrastructure in-house at all. No internal security requirements, no internal resource requirements, and no skills are required to to get things up and running. We can offer you just the client experience if you wish. Equally, we can also allow you to run the desktop application and connect to our hosted server services.

So full flexibility is really key. And no matter which option you choose, you get the full desktop experience. It’s the customer’s choice how they want to move forward with our tools.

Secondly, security. We were very conscious of the fact that customers want to make sure their data is secure. The pharmaceutical industry goes through a lot of regulation and security is a real hot topic, and companies want to make sure with their investment in their own intellectual property, it remains their own intellectual property. So security was a really big focus for us.

AppStream brings a lot of security features out of the box, and we were able to augment these with four different layers of security, to make sure that any data that’s put into our cloud environment, either through a hosted service or a full StarDrop in the cloud experience, or just StarDrop client experience, is secure. Customers can be rest assured that any data that they put in their environment is fully secured and will not be open to abuse by outside organisations.

What standards does Optibrium hold for data security?

ISO 27001 is an industry-standard information security certification. And it’s something we were really mindful of as part of our ongoing deployment in the cloud. We wanted to prove to our customers that we are good custodians of their data. And, that security is really important to us. So, we went through the exercise about a year and a half ago to get certified in ISO 27001.

This ISO, as I mentioned, is recognised as an industry-standard security application. It is a very rigorous process to go through to pass. We were we passed with flying colors first time around. This gives our customers confidence, as well as the security we have in the tool, to know that information security is a high priority for us and their data is safe.

What is the future for Optibrium’s cloud-based drug discovery?

What’s the future of our cloud environment? We have now released fully cloud-based products. StarDrop in the cloud is one of these and hosted services is another. We now offer Cerella, which is our AI-driven modelling capability through the cloud. And we’ve recently just released a new product called Semeta, a metabolite prediction tool. Because of the speed to market we were able to achieve with Appstream, we were able to take new code and build new products on the back of it. Customers now have a choice around how they deploy our products, particularly the products that we offer from our cloud environment.

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