Pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations are under intense pressures, from competitive product launch cycles through to the critical need for research into population health to cope with major changes in the environment. Lacking a capable data management platform, data scientists and bioinformaticians have to resort to time consuming and expensive manual data management activities that don’t scale.
Considering the processing, moving, storing and keeping track of ever increasing amounts of data; together with the challenges of security, safely and economically storing data long term; and the need to find that data in the future, better data management could drive blockbuster results for life sciences companies.
The Hutchison/MRC Research Centre at the University of Cambridge is a cancer research facility. Built in 2001, it is now the leading site for basic and translational cancer research in Cambridge. Without a data management system in place, the existing infrastructure at the facility was centred on storage, consisting of several network-attached storage (NAS) devices used by more than 200 users.
Data storage was reaching its limits, and the equipment was reaching its end of life, requiring additional storage to be purchased on an ad-hoc basis to meet the growing demand. As a result, the Hutchison/ MRC Research Centre data became scattered across several different data stores, making it difficult for researchers to understand where to find the data they needed.