- Introduction
- Why was Cloud technology required in the vaccination process?
- Why embrace the cloud all of a sudden?
- Benefits cloud computing offers healthcare providers during the pandemic
- Combatting the COVID situation using the cloud technology
- Concluding thoughts
Introduction
As per ourworldindata.org, around 94% of the world population still awaits the production and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to save lives, relieve fear and anxiety, and improve the economy. Considering the world population, billions of humans need to be vaccinated in a shorter period to reduce the effect of the Coronavirus.
Why was cloud technology required in the vaccination process?
The only solution to achieve what we discussed above is to make the vaccines available at the right place, at the right time, for the right number of people. This is exactly when the possibility of implementing a cloud platform to effectively produce, manage and deliver the vaccines surfaced. As a result, IBM has developed Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with a full-stacked automation process to manage hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud deployments to help countries to reach and vaccinate more people faster.
While one may not think about the links between the biomedical industry and cloud computing, it surprisingly does. Cloud computing has been a significant contributor to vaccine development. It has portrayed its significance in the Covid-struck era, with hundreds of vaccine companies, researchers, scientists, and government organizations relying on the efficacy and benefits of cloud computing to the solution offered that interacts with the deadly virus.
Also Read: Cloud Computing and it’s Types
Why is the healthcare industry embracing the cloud all of a sudden?
The Healthcare industry has been quite lagging in adopting cloud computing technologies. But, the recent turn of events and advancements over the years have pushed them to shift from on-premises data solutions to cloud-based solutions.
Cloud computing technology provides accessibility and flexibility to help researchers and scientists get hold of data and information and develop potential vaccines faster and effectively.
Although cost and reliability played the primary share in fast-forwarding the transition, the benefits that the cloud had to offer were far beyond these core requirements.
Benefits cloud computing is offering to healthcare providers during the pandemic
1. Scalability
With the requirements of coronavirus vaccines surging this pandemic, it was never an option for the hospitals and labs to rely on the existing conventional IT infrastructure. On-premise IT infrastructure will not be able to handle the enormous amount of data due to the limited amount of hardware and processors. More hardware is required to handle the data flowing through, and it would cost significantly high to add new hardware and systems.
The adoption of cloud technology helped healthcare organizations increase their processing and memory capacity dynamically without investing in additional hardware.
How Google helped Arizona in getting its citizens vaccinated
The problem statement: Arizona’s Department of Health Services faced a challenge to effectively vaccinate its 4 million citizens.
The solution offered: In December 2020, they partnered with Google Cloud and MTX to build end-to-end vaccine management and distribution system. This strategic move was planned so that the citizens of Arizona can schedule and systematically receive the vaccine. Google Cloud built a centralized solution that helps counties effectively manage and monitor the vaccine administration process.
The outcome: As per the latest received statistics, Arizona was able to administer 2.6 million vaccines, out of which the Google Cloud system booked close to 1.5 million appointments.
2. Data Sharing
The distributive power of the cloud helped healthcare providers, researchers, etc., to make the vaccine data available and accessible to every nook and corner of the world. Healthcare organizations have been effectively using the cloud to share and move the data in a common channel to speed up the vaccination process and reduce the communication time.
The cloud provides users with the ability to access a shared pool of research data and test results that help in streamlining the process, thereby reducing redundancies and bottlenecks.
3. Processing Power
Biomedical research involves massive datasets and a vast array of variables. This number-crunching data is handled by high-performance computing (HPC) equipment. The HPC equipment powers the machine learning algorithms and processes the big data workloads in no time. The sad part is that most researchers do not have access to these resources, which in turn slows down the development of vaccines.
Cloud technology comes as a savior in such cases. It allowed organizations to rapidly increase their processing power by utilizing cloud applications, churning down the costs of hardware required.
Where Commonwealth of Massachusetts used the cloud to ramp up vaccination efforts
The problem statement: The citizens had to search to find appointments and slot availability repeatedly.
Solution offered: The Google Cloud launched a new vaccine pre-registration system that eliminated the necessity to repeatedly search for vaccine slot availability. The system sent a status update to pre-registered users regarding their registration status, availability of vaccines and appointments, and links to book an appointment. The process was designed in such a way that if a user does not reserve an appointment within 24 hours of allotment, the slot would be transferred to the next resident.
The outcome: Within a single day of the launch, more than 4,00,000 citizens pre-registered for the vaccine, and the site traffic saw 19 pre-registrations per second.
Combatting the COVID situation using the cloud technology
Leading cloud technology companies like Google, Oracle, Amazon, and IBM have come forward with their technology offering to combat the hardships faced during the vaccination process. Google announced its Intelligent Vaccine Impact solution (IVIs) to help communities make the vaccine available to the people quickly and effectively. Cloud technology giants have been able to support the vaccination efforts and contribute significantly to the process.
Massive amounts of data have been gathered and analyzed by doctors and specialists worldwide with the help of cloud computing to find a vaccine that can put the Coronavirus pandemic to an end. With sparsely around 6% of the entire world population completely vaccinated, it becomes ever more challenging how the healthcare industry and governments are going to leverage the power of cloud computing to distribute and vaccinate the masses effectively.
Also Read: 5 ways on how to learn Cloud Computing from the scratch
Concluding thoughts
Technology harnessed the right way gives birth to a wide array of benefits. So far, the cloud has made significant strides in terms of vaccine development and distribution and can contribute to various other aspects.
The requirement of cloud technology professionals has been on the rise this era due to the rise of technological requirements on a larger scale. If you’re planning to start your career in the cloud technology domain and contribute to making lives better, then the PG Program in Cloud Computing will be the right start for you. The program is offered in collaboration with Great Learning and is powered by AWS education.
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