Comparison Of Cloud Computing Vendors In Healthcare Domain

Discuss about the Research and Technical Computing on AWS.

In cloud computing or in providing cloud based solutions, there are three major vendors which are competing with each other to sustain in the global market. They are:

1. AWS (Amazon Web Services)
2. Microsoft Azure and
3. Google Cloud Computing

AWS and its features are discussed below:

• AWS Mobile – The major benefit of using this feature is that it provides free startup service. It says that a user has to pay only for those services which get beyond the free tier. It also enables in creating fast service which means that cloud options can be enabled or integrated in minutes and this comes without managing any servers. In mobile, not only deploying the application but also, there is a need to test the applications after deploying and AWS mobile provides that service too. And on top of that, it also provides services such as SMS and meaningful email conversations (AWS, 2018).
• Research & Technical Computing on AWS – AWS helps researches to process complex data flow or workloads and provide them with cost-effective, secure to compute, scalable, storage and database capabilities that are necessary to advance in science and technology. With the help of Hybrid services, doctors can only concentrate on the data results rather than focusing on the servers and how they should be collaborated globally. AWS takes care of that (AWS, 2018).
• Backup and Restore – As the data set grows, the next concern is to store, protect and recover the data if it is lost and, it also gets challenging to maintain the data. AWS offers best tools in industry to scale, secure backup and ensure durability of the data. The benefits of using this services is that it comes with:
  • Durability and Availability
  • Cost- effectiveness
  • Flexibility and Scalability
  • Compliance, security, flexible data transfer etc (AWS, 2018)
• DevOps – AWS provides companies to build their products, automating their releases and monitoring their applications with ease. It is also programmable.
• Server-less computing – AWS provides server-less computing which says that the developers can focus on programming rather than on maintaining the servers.
• Healthcare & Life Sciences – This service helps in providing solutions with data management lifecycle and also helps in incorporating new technology with security and, help doctors for innovating new solutions in healthcare domain (AWS, 2018).

• Mobile – This feature uses Mobile backend as a service (MBaaS). It allows programmers to write the code in any one language and, this service will take it over and target every device as its service (Microsoft, 2018).
• Dynamics on Azure – This feature will help in making smart decisions; redesign the business processes and helps in business growth using its cloud-based solution. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), BI (Business Intelligence), and infrastructure and database services helps in making smart decisions (Microsoft, 2018).
• DevOps – This feature will help in processing the technology, automating the software and delivering the application with continuous integration. It doesn’t matter how big IT department is, this feature solves the problem with ease. The simplified features include:
• Continuous integration
• Continuous delivery
• Continuous deployment with CI/CD (Microsoft, 2018)
• Development and test
• Red Hat Solutions – This feature will help in quickly deploying the application with secure, reliable and flexible hybrid cloud using Red Hat Solutions.
• Health and life sciences

• API Management – In modern application, API management will play a key role because there is a need for developers to build their own application with the customized settings and options that has to be put in the application. This feature will create business opportunities and will break down boundaries and can be targeted to each and every small business groups. This feature comes with security, monitors runtime API traffic and also provides features like key validation, quota management, authorization and access control etc (Google, 2018).
• Healthcare & Life sciences Solutions – This feature gets combined with machine intelligence for better care (Google, 2018).
• Data Integration and Advanced Analytics
• Google grade Security – this feature provides security across all the Google applications such as Google Apps and Gmail.
• No Ops Anymore – This feature will provide fewer options and allow the developers to write their code to create and perform as their application needs.
• Live migration – Applications can be hosted on any part of the world and to shut down the application even for a minute is a loss for a business. Hence, this feature will allow deploying the application when the application is running. It doesn’t matter if the application is receiving heavy loads of traffic or not (SpringPeople, 2018).

• Cost savings – AWS provides free service until the fire tier has been exhausted and there are other services that can be used at free of cost. Managing servers, continuous deploying of the application and managing huge data isn’t an easy task. Here comes the power of cloud computing. This takes the ownership of your application and provides high security of data, backup and restores solutions that are more reliable, scalable.
• Manageability – Cloud computing provides more enhanced and simple IT management infrastructure to the application. Maintenance, infrastructural updates are eliminated and all these are maintained by service providers or vendors. This helps the users to just focus on building the application without any concern about IT part.
• Security – Security is an utmost concern. Mainly in health domain, the patient’s data should be kept secure and private. Cloud provides best solutions to keep the data private.
• Backup – Cloud also provides backup on their servers.
• Disaster recovery – Every application because of several reasons backup the data so that the disaster recovery gets the application back and running. This helps in speedy recovery without causing much damage and potential harm to the overall business. This clearly states that there is a need of control in business. And when it is out of control, cloud based solutions helps in preventing the disaster and helps in fast recovery in terms of bringing the application back in running state.
• Automatic software updates – There is no need to concern about cutting- edge software that gets into industry to provide any sort of security features to the application or any IT infrastructure. The service providers will take care of all these and keep the application safe and secure with the latest software updates.
• Flexibility – If the data are huge and runs into data-storage issue then, there is no way that the application is highly optimized and should run after storage and maintenance issues with the servers. IT hosting is also one of the main concern. Because of the continuous and rapid development in technology both in context of security and maintenance, IT infrastructure should be updated on timely basis. Consuming time on these will definitely reduce overall productivity of a business or the application. Here, cloud computing based solutions come handy and the service providers will take care of these issues.
• Mobility – Once the application is deployed, cloud will target each and every device irrespective of the programming language in which the application has been written.

• Downtime – If the servers are down by any reason, there is a chance that the business process can be temporarily suspended.
• Security – Even though cloud is doing its best in securing the data, there have been leakage of data over cloud because of many factors such as lose in private keys and authorization issues.
• Limited control – Cloud infrastructure is completely owned by the vendors which directly imply that there will be less control at the receiver end. This has to be changed.
• Since all the vendors have their own APIs that has been written which isn’t unique, every organization who uses cloud services needs to have a specialist on cloud computing. For small scale business applications, this is a costly matter.

• Predictive SDLC is a waterfall model. It consists of phases such as design, implementation, deploying, testing, maintenance etc.
• If the application is small and if the application is targeting only limited groups then, predictive SDLC supports well. Because the design gets changed after it has been finalized.
• It is cost- effective because at the designing stage, the classification gets down data, architecture, interface design and procedure to follow. There is definitely low energy consumption when it is predictive SDLC (Singh & Saxena, 2013).
• Development process is quick and maintenance of the application is super easy.
• Testing is easy across all platforms.

• There is no possibility of redesigning the application.
• There is no possibility of moving up in the waterfall model.
• Users are given less freedom or the clients are given less freedom because once the design is finalized, it remains the same throughout the sprint.

• This is an agile methodology.
• Clients get mostly benefited in this methodology because the client has the flexibility to ask for redesign and the process goes on till the clients get satisfied.
• Each programmer or the application builder is counted in agile methodology because everyone is considered as core member and this helps at every stage of the application because each and every programmer and tester gets to know in and out of the application.
• This is suitable in today’s dynamic environments (Tutorial Point, 2018).
• Minimal rules
• Promotes team work.

• This approach is not suitable for the application which has complex data structure or complex algorithms because, changing environment will result in loss of resource and time.
• Risk of sustainability, extensibility and in maintenance too.
• Deadlines aren’t a matter in this type of methodology because of the changing process.
• This methodology heavily depends on the client satisfaction, customer interaction and if the customer or client isn’t sure of the application design, it is waste of resources.
• No proper designs are finalized and no planning on which technology should be used to support the application.

To summarize, selecting cloud based solution for health domain, Google Cloud Computing provides best solution because it is cost- effective and also have good infrastructure and also have its servers and is hosted widely across the globe. More to that, Google Cloud Computing provides developers offers more flexibility to develop and build their own applications with less configuration but more freedom for development.

While coming to SDLC, in health domain, predictive SDLC is best suited because the application design is built once and it will be used over the period of time. This reduces time, highly manageable and testing can be done with ease with the help of cloud based solutions.

AWS. (2018). AWS Mobile. Retrieved from Aws.amazon.com: https://aws.amazon.com/mobile/

AWS. (2018). Backup & Restore. Retrieved from Aws.amazon.com: https://aws.amazon.com/backup-restore/

AWS. (2018). Cloud Computing in Healthcare. Retrieved from Aws.amazon.com: https://aws.amazon.com/health/

AWS. (2018). Research & Technical Computing on AWS. Retrieved from Aws.amazon.com: https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/research-and-technical-computing/

Google. (2018). Healthcare & Life Sciences Solutions. Retrieved from Cloud.google.com/solutions/: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/healthcare-life-sciences/

Google. (2018). Manage APIs more securely and efficiently. Retrieved from Services.google.com: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/modern_app_interfaces_api_one_pager_v4.pdf

Microsoft. (2018, May 25). DevOps. Retrieved from Azure.microsoft.com: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/solutions/devops/

Microsoft. (2018, May 25). Dynamics on Azure. Retrieved from Azure.microsoft.com: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/solutions/dynamics/

Microsoft. (2018, May 25). Mobile. Retrieved from Azure.microsoft.com: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/solutions/mobile/

Singh, N., & Saxena, A. (2013, January). A Green Software Development Life Cycle for Cloud Computing. IT Professional, 15(1), 28-34.

SpringPeople. (2018). Google Cloud Computing – Elements, Features and Benefits. Retrieved from Springpeople.com: https://www.springpeople.com/blog/google-cloud-computing-elements-features-benefits/

Tutorial Point. (2018, May 25). SDLC – Agile Model. Retrieved from Tutorialspoint.com: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/sdlc/sdlc_agile_model.htm