Clinical Trials in the Cloud

I got a phone call the other day from a longtime OpenClinica user about the announcement of our new OpenClinica Optimized™ Hosting. He remarked on how leading companies in the industry (including his) are making big investments in cloud computing products and services, because these technologies provide easy-to-access functionality on an infrastructure that is more redundant, scalable, and cost-effective than you could hope to build or buy on your own.

However, in the clinical research field, putting together such an offering is not for the faint of heart. Though our free OpenClinica Community Edition has been installed and run by users on cloud servers for years, our OpenClinica Enterprise Edition offering (which carries regulatory guarantees) would have to meet rigorous reliability, security, and regulatory compliance requirements. How can this be accomplished if you don’t actually know where your data physically resides at any point in time on the cloud?