Genomics Compute, Storage & Data Management Q&A

Everyone knows data is growing at exponential rates. In fact, the numbers can be mind-numbing. That’s certainly the case when it comes to genomic data where 40,000PB of storage each year will be needed by 2025. Understanding, managing and storing this massive amount of data was the topic at our SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webcast “Moving Genomics to the Cloud: Compute and Storage Considerations.” If you missed the live presentation, it’s available on-demand along with presentation slides. Our live audience asked many interesting questions during the webcast, but we did not have time to answer them all. As promised, our experts, Michael McManus, Torben Kling Petersen and Christopher Davidson have answered them all here. Q. Human genomes differ only by 1% or so, there’s an immediate 100x improvement in terms of data compression, 2743EB could become 27430PB, that’s 2.743M HDDs of 10TB each. We have ~200 countries for the 7.8B people, and each country could have 10 sequencing centers on average, each center would need a mere 1.4K HDDs, is there really a big challenge here? A. The problem is not that simple unfortunately. The location of genetic differences and the size of the genetic differences vary a lot across people. Still, there are compression methods like CRAM and PetaGene that can save a lot of space. Also consider all of the sequencing for rare disease, cancer, single cell sequencing, etc. plus sequencing for agricultural products. Q. What’s the best compression ratio for human genome data? Read More

Learn How to Develop Interoperable Cloud Encryption and Access Control

SNIA Cloud is hosting a live webcast on December 20th, “Developing Interoperable Cloud Encryption and Access Control,” to discuss and demonstrate encrypted objects and delegated access control. For the data protection needs of sharing health and other data across different cloud services, this webcast will explore the capabilities of the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) in addressing these requirements and show implementations of CDMI extensions for a health care example.

See it in action! This webcast will include a demonstration by Peter van Liesdonk of Philips who will share the results of testing at the SDC 2016 Cloud Plugfest for Encrypted Objects and Delegated Access Control extensions to CDMI 1.1.1.

You’ll will see and learn:

  • New CDMI features (Encrypted Objects and Delegated Access Control)
  • Implementation experiences with new features
  • A live demo of a healthcare-based example

Register today. My colleagues, Peter van Liesdonk, David Slik and I will be on-hand to answer any questions you may have. We hope to see you there.

 

Mobile and Secure Healthcare: Encrypted Objects and Access Control Delegation

Healthcare privacy and data protection regulations are among the most stringent of any industry. On January 28th, SNIA Cloud Storage will host a live Webcast to discuss how healthcare organizations can securely share health data across different cloud services.

Hear experts Martin Rosner, Standardization Officer at Philips and David Slik, Co-Chair, SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group explore how Encrypted Objects and Delegated Access Control Extensions to the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) standard permits objects to freely and securely move between clouds and clients with enhanced security and auditability.

You’ll learn:

  • Protecting health data from alteration or disclosure
  • How Cloud Encrypted Objects work
  • How Delegated Access Control works
  • CDMI for Electronic Medical Records (EMR) applications
  • Healthcare use cases for implementing securely sharing data in the cloud

This Webcast will be live, so please bring your questions. I encourage you register today. We hope to see you on the 28th.

Securely Sharing Health Care Data across Different Cloud Services

As more and more health care providers leverage the efficiencies of the cloud, the need to share health care data across different cloud services arises. Sharing health care data across cloud services must ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the health data and preserve the privacy of the patients in such a way that revealing the data to other data requestors is performed only with patient consent.

The Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) international standard is a protocol that has been standardized by SNIA to create interoperable data management services in cloud storage.

The Cloud Storage TWG has just released a technical white paper, “Towards a CDMI Health Care Profile,” that explores the capabilities of CDMI in addressing these requirements, and provides suggestions for possible extensions that are appropriate for a health care profile.

I encourage you to download this paper to learn:

  • Motivations for protecting health data
  • Health data protection requirements
  • A use case that promotes the deployment of health data protection
  • Requirements and implementation aspects of the use case
  • Use case architecture
  • Future use cases roadmap

I hope you’ll find this paper enlightening and welcome feedback and comments on its content here in this blog.