A number of biomedical research centres are located in the 4 Regions of Convergence, including medical research and healthcare (IRCCS), livestock health research institutes (IZS), multidisciplinary research centres and biobanks.
The usage of ICT by this community was, up to a few years ago, very limited; however, it is now growing dramatically due to the diffusion of the “Big Data” paradigm in this context, but also to the availability of more accessible and user-friendly e-Infrastructures and services.
Nowadays the biomedical community needs to collect, process, archive and most importantly share data with global research teams, and needs that strict privacy and confidentiality policies are enforced at each of these steps to protect the patients’ data.
Key requirements for this community include:
accessible, easy-to-use e-infrastructures and services
- Bi-directionality and symmetry of network access links: accessing large data bases hosted elsewhere is not enough anymore, as the community itself plays an active role in producing new data and sharing them;
- IaaS access to computing and – most importantly – storage resources with strong requirements in terms of security, data confidentiality and integrity, and longer-term preservation;
- Access and support to dedicated, easy-to-use SaaS services;
- User-friendly file sharing and collaborative tools, capable of protecting data integrity and confidentiality.