ClearScale Blog

There was a time not long ago that words like “artificial intelligence” brought to mind human-like robots and mega-computers out to take over the world. Today, artificial intelligence, known as AI, along with machine learning (ML), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Big Data, are becoming “business as usual” for an increasing number of companies. They’re driving innovation, creating efficiencies, generating new products and services, and opening the door to entirely new business models. It’s all because of

From climate-resistant crops to the ability to predict the level of disease risk in healthy individuals, genomics — the study of the full genetic balance of an organism — holds great promise for the world. It’s a data-intensive field where reproducibility, efficient management, and fast processing of large amounts of data are essential. One thing that slows down that processing is doing things manually. That was the case for a recent ClearScale customer. Lack of the right IT architecture required one

Container technology continues to grow in popularity. It’s considered by many in the IT industry as the go-to strategy for virtualization. In fact, we get a lot of requests here at ClearScale by customers who are interested in using the technology to meet their project needs. Like most technologies, however, containers have security risks. In 2017, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a guide that identifies many of those risks and offers recommendations for mitigating them

Cloud adoption statistics are high, indicating that companies are continuing to move to the cloud. But that doesn’t mean your company should jump on the cloud bandwagon — at least not without the right strategy and assistance. It’s one thing to implement software-as-a-service (SaaS) or a cloud-first strategy for new systems. It’s an entirely different ball game when it comes to moving enterprise systems to the cloud — particularly legacy systems and those that require high availability. Not all

What’s the General Data Protection Regulation, known as GDPR, have to do with the cloud? The answer: a lot. Personal data — any data that can identify a person — is increasingly making its way into the cloud. For example, organizations are using IoT-connected devices, AI, and RFID technologies to collect, use, and integrate personal information into products and are storing and processing that data in the cloud. GDPR provides updated legislation throughout the EU to protect that personal

Pharmaceutical research is data-intensive. It takes tremendous computational power to parse and analyze the requisite giant chunks of data. The cloud delivers that power and helps accelerate research processes and, ultimately, research findings. That’s why one pharmaceutical company was using some “off the shelf” CloudFormation templates to create its own powerful informatics environment on the AWS Cloud. However, the company determined that it needed assistance in optimizing that environment. A key driver was its use of a set of

It’s one thing to create a platform to support software development. But it requires special expertise to build out one that specifically employs AWS best practices and meets rigorous compliance requirements. The challenge is further intensified when the software development process relies on open-source libraries to accelerate time-to-market. With open source libraries come open-source vulnerabilities. The Assignment When a life sciences organization requested ClearScale’s assistance in creating infrastructure for a new software project, the ClearScale team knew a

In the world of software development, the use of a feature branch workflow is a good thing. The idea is that all feature development takes place in a dedicated branch instead of the master branch. One of the benefits is that multiple developers can work on a particular feature without disturbing the main codebase. That was how a ClearScale customer was handling new feature development for the software underlying one of its key products. However, the process required dynamically and

Machine learning-enabled medical image analysis. Prosthetics customized for individual patient comfort and performance courtesy of 3D printing. Context-aware, real-time communication platforms. Virtual Reality (VR) tools that enable medical students to experience and learn from life-and-death scenarios in low-stakes environments. They’re among the numerous examples of technology pushing healthcare to new levels of efficiency and sophistication. In many cases, the technologies driving these innovations are cloud-based. That’s good and, in the minds of some healthcare organizations, not so good

It’s a common problem. You can’t seem to develop and deploy applications fast enough to meet your customers’ changing demands. By automating the processes involved, however, you can speed things up. You’re also able to scale-up and -down on the fly, reduce manual errors, improve the overall availability of the application and realize the cost benefits of on-demand compute. Sounds great, right? But as Tom Hanks’ character said in the movie A League of Their Own, “If