Book:Choosing and Implementing a Cloud-based Service for Your Laboratory/Considerations when choosing and implementing a cloud solution/What questions should you ask yourself?

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6.3 What questions should you ask yourself?

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Here we provide a concise listing of questions your organization should be asking internally at various steps of a cloud project. If you've followed a formal project management path, your lab may have asked many of these questions already during goal setting, scope setting, risk assessment, and requirement documentation. If so, fantastic; you have most of the answers. However, if prior cloud project management steps failed to address them, now is certainly the time, before you start your laboratory's provider research in earnest. While these questions are loosely ordered in a traditional project management path, their order is not significant otherwise. Just be sure your laboratory has considered or will be considering these questions.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

  1. What do we hope to achieve by transitioning operations to the cloud?
  2. Who among staff is best able to act as a go-between with the executive team in order to increase support for cloud adoption?
  3. Have we developed a comprehensive project plan with goals, objectives, benefits, etc. and how cloud computing factors into them?
  4. If not, who can be trusted to develop and implement such a cloud computing plan for our lab, or the organization as a whole?
  5. Do we fully understand the regulations and accreditation requirements that drive security for our organization and its data?
  6. What proficiencies and skills do lab technicians and IT staff currently have in computing, and cloud computing in particular?
  7. Have we polled our users and relevant stakeholders about how they currently use existing computing services and access their data as part of their workflow? (For example, if internet access isn't readily available in the lab, this will have to change with cloud.)
  8. What kind of data are we putting in the cloud?
  9. Has anyone conducted an independent assessment of the potential risks and vulnerabilities to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of health or other sensitive data and information stored in our systems?
  10. Do we fully understand the informatics strengths and gaps within our organization?
  11. Do we fully understand the risks associated with cloud computing and how to best mitigate them?
  12. Are we willing to take the time to compare the operational effectiveness, costs, risks, and security concerns of multiple cloud providers before we make a decision?
  13. How bad can things go wrong if we (or the cloud provider) are attacked?
  14. What will we (and the cloud provider) do to proactively detect, prevent, and remediate security breaches?
  15. What will our back-up and protection mechanisms be to mitigate data loss due to fire or other catastrophic events both on-premises and in the cloud?

References

  1. ↑ Agilent Technologies (21 February 2019). "Cloud Adoption for Lab Informatics: Trends, Opportunities, Considerations, Next Steps" (PDF). Agilent Technologies. https://www.agilent.com/cs/library/whitepaper/public/whitepaper-cloud-adoption-openlab-5994-0718en-us-agilent.pdf. Retrieved 28 July 2023. 
  2. ↑ Association of Public Health Laboratories (2017). "Breaking Through the Cloud: A Laboratory Guide to Cloud Computing" (PDF). Association of Public Health Laboratories. https://www.aphl.org/aboutAPHL/publications/Documents/INFO-2017Jun-Cloud-Computing.pdf. Retrieved 28 July 2023. 
  3. ↑ "A Helpful Guide to Cloud Computing in a Laboratory". InterFocus Blog. InterFocus Ltd. 5 October 2020. https://www.mynewlab.com/blog/a-helpful-guide-to-cloud-computing-in-a-laboratory/. Retrieved 28 July 2023. 
  4. ↑ O'Malley, K. (19 February 2021). "Is Moving Operational Technology to the Cloud a Good Idea?". SecurityRoundtable.org. https://www.securityroundtable.org/is-moving-operational-technology-to-the-cloud-a-good-idea/. Retrieved 28 July 2023. 
  5. ↑ Eustice, J.C. (2018). "Understand the intersection between data privacy laws and cloud computing". Legal Technology, Products, and Services. Thomson Reuters. https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/insights/articles/understanding-data-privacy-and-cloud-computing. Retrieved 28 July 2023. 
  6. ↑ Donnelly, C. (8 April 2021). "The OVHCloud fire: Assessing the after-effects on datacentre operators and cloud users". ComputerWeekly. Archived from the original on 08 April 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210408103340/https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252498983/OVHCloud-datacentre-fire-Assessing-the-after-effects-on-datacentre-operators-and-cloud-users. Retrieved 28 July 2023. 
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