Utilizing cloud technology to solve challenges in modern laboratories

Exchanging data between laboratories can be challenging: internal data management can be facilitated with laboratory information systems (LIMS), however, these are rarely interconnected across companies. Furthermore, migrating processes across laboratories is nearly impossible without effort. Setting up a federated cloud-infrastructure can help to overcome these difficulties: multiple laboratories participate in a federation. Customers order services and may explicitly authorize laboratories to cross-access their data. Ultimately, obliterating the barrier between computational- and wet lab services results in an easy integration of different services to meet the personalized needs of customers: bioinformatics analyses, provided as Software as a Service in the cloud, can be based on data created by experiments conducted in laboratories by different service providers. Permissions management is done by the cloud-platform, which guarantees isolation of data. To facilitate this obliteration of barriers, we demonstrate an easy integration of automated wet-lab processes into a cloud. We explain, how standardized laboratory devices can be integrated into a cloud-lab, which can easily be replicated and modified on demand. Finally, we conclude with a proof-of-concept - demonstrating aforementioned use case and postulating that the time is ready for the emerging of numerous cloud-laboratories.