“The National Institutes of Health has an important role in the coronavirus pandemic as it leads vaccine efforts and continues to be the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. As the agency transitioned to a near-100% teleworking environment and postponed non-mission-critical laboratory operations, it has had to overcome challenges in equipping researchers with secure access to data and tools to continue agency missions.”
“’The NIH has a fantastic backbone. We’ve got great networking. But [researchers] want to access terabytes at a time, and you can’t do that from home very easily,’ said Eric Gallagher, CIO of NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative, during an ACT-IAC event panel July 9.”
“Culturally, the new environment has been a significant change for the agency given the physical nature of collecting participant data and presenting results at large events with colleagues…”
“A majority of NIH research is also conducted outside of its main campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The agency funds nearly 300,000 principal investigators working at 3,000 academic medical centers across the country, NIH’s Cloud Services for Research Program Manager Nick Weber noted during a separate ACT-IAC forum last week…
“’Many of those are looking to make the move to cloud for their research purposes — to get the benefits of scale, collaboration, the ability to store and analyze data in ways that they couldn’t with the tools cloud service providers have to offer,’ Weber said.”
“Not only are researchers looking to cloud for interoperable systems and advanced data analytics, but they’re also looking at it to share and present in a remote environment…” Read the full article here.
Source: NIH’s Cloud Enabled Shifts to How Researchers Work During Pandemic – By Faith Ryan, July 20, 2020. GovernmentCIO.
