OREANDA-NEWS. BT today announced the launch in Japan of BT for Life Sciences R&D, the cloud service designed to enable collaboration within the life sciences industry for increased R&D productivity. This service is aimed at allowing customers to comply with the industry's stringent security, regulatory and compliance requirements in a way that is suitable for many regulated applications a company may wish to deploy. Additionally, to further comply with personal privacy information regulations, this cloud service will be hosted in Japan and the data will stay in Japan unless the customer moves it somewhere else. Customers have complete control over where their applications run, where their data is stored and how the data moves between different countries.

BT for Life Sciences R&D is developed as a secure and segregated platform for scientists in pharmaceutical, biotech, devices & diagnostics companies as well as in academia and government. This allows them to construct and orchestrate in silico 1 workflows and data pipelines to identify new pharmaceutical targets and drug candidates. In addition, this platform enables research scientists to create global project groups and collaborate safely and securely via federated identity management and authentication tools on top of built-in secure sharing/social applications. This ecosystem allows the group to securely upload documents, share results and communicate via IM, voice, video or chat to analyse results in an environment that segments data and uses qualified hardware components and workflows specific to the pharmaceutical industry.

The BT for Life Sciences R&D platform is supported by the BT Assure portfolio of security services. These allow BT to assist customers in designing data encryption, anonymization 2, risk management and resilience to meet their quality and regulatory requirements for the cloud environment.

The platform builds on BT's On Demand Compute service, with an innovative compliance "wrap" meeting the GxP 3 requirements for qualification. This enables customers to conform to the quality and regulatory requirements, providing an environment suitable for many regulated applications used collaboratively amongst partners who may have differing risk profiles.

Using the in silico workbench functionality of BT for Life Sciences R&D, scientists have easy access to the applications and information they need to make predictive simulations. The new platform brings together in Japan a number of scientific applications and data sources to provide immediate functionality and ease of use. Embedded cloud orchestration tools significantly simplify IT management and resourcing requirements.

BT for Life Sciences R&D can be combined with other innovative capabilities of the BT portfolio, such as BT One (collaboration and unified communications) and BT Connect (high capacity secure network to allow for interoperability between private, hybrid and public clouds). Customers will also benefit from BT Advise's professional services capabilities in terms of application selection and migration to Cloud, orchestration support, consulting services and design of Cloud environment elements.

Haruno Yoshida, managing director of BT Japan, said: "Businesses in Japan including the healthcare, life sciences and pharmaceutical industries are all being changed by 'Abenomics'. As a new government program aimed at improving the economy, Abenomics cover initiatives around open data and big data analytics. Through our BT Life Sciences platform, we will help our customers meet these requirements and enable them to deliver stunning business outcomes through speeding up their R&D on innovative new products. It can empower our customers to accelerate time to market and reduce research costs, thus contributing to increased profits".