Cloud service checklist for academic communities and customization for genome medical research

Abstract

In this paper, we present a cloud service checklist designed to help IT administrators or researchers in academic organizations select the most suitable cloud services. This checklist, which comprises items that we believe IT administrators or researchers in academic organizations should consider when they adopt cloud services, comprehensively covers the issues related to a variety of cloud services, including security, functionality, performance, and law. In response to the increasing demands for storage and computing resources in genome medical science communities, various guidelines for using resources operated by external organizations, such as cloud services, have been published by different academic funding agencies and the Japanese government. However, it is sometimes difficult to identify the checklist items that satisfy the genome medical science community’s guidelines, and some of these requirements are not included in the existing checklists. This issue provided our motivation for creating a cloud service checklist customized for genome medical research communities. The resulting customized checklist is designed to help researchers easily find information about the cloud services that satisfy the guidelines in genome medical science communities. Additionally, we explore whether many cloud service providers satisfy the requirements or checklist items in the cloud service checklist for genome medical research by evaluating their survey responses.