Every nation has its own style of governance and policy making, influenced by history, culture and politics among other factors. But if there’s one issue that has unanimously unified the world, it is COVID19. The novel Coronavirus strain that originated in the industrial province of Wuhan, China in January has since made its way across the world, killing more than 37,000 and affecting more than 786,000.

A stringent lockdown, followed by rigourous testing is the way to beat this pandemic, or atleast control its spread. With lesser people on the move, it buys healthcare workers time to treat already affected patients, and researchers a way to find a possible cure. However, it is important to note that most healthcare systems in the world – even the most advanced ones – are struggling to cope with this virus. For a large part, it’s the lack of information that is staggering research and medical efforts. But, the cloud is soon emerging as a viable solution to address these needs.

Cloud computing – simply put, the delivery of computing services – has become the most preferred manner of delivering enterprise applications, extend infrastructure and even enable innovation to take place. Without investing in new hardware or software, cloud allows customers to acquire new capabilities and tools.

In the wake of the COVID19 outbreak, cloud computing has become a trusted partner for almost every major company, government, NGO, enterprise and startup. Several major cloud providers are offering their services mainly to researchers and scientists in their fight against COVID19, and to other enterprises to enable remote work to continue without undue disruption.

Cloud Services Get A Fillip From Industries Bullish On Digitalisation:

COVID19 was first reported in Wuhan, China. The nation alone had 81500+ cases, with over 3,300 deaths. Other Asian nations that reported high numbers were South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. This is pertinent to note, because even though cases were on the rise, they were controlled fairly early – and largely by deploying a range of technology solutions to do so that included surveillance, contact tracking using GPS and spatial analysis, data analytics and AI. The data emerging from these countries have now formed a base-level for scientists & medical workers to understand this virus better, and perhaps share their learnings with the world. And the cloud has a critical role to play here.

China’s cloud infrastructure market grew 66.9% to $3.3billion in Q4 2019. The quarter alone put China on a $13.2 billion run rate, while US companies were pegged at $14billion with a 47% market share. Alibaba led the market share in China with 46%, followed by Tencent and Baidu at 18% and 8.8% respectively. Experts believe that the significant rise in market share for cloud services was pegged on industries like healthcare, finance and transport, and their rapid digitalization in the past decade.

However, the COVID19 situation may have just cemented the stronghold of cloud service providers.

Let’s take a look at what are the most relevant and urgent needs of the hour, and how the cloud is providing access:

Genome Sequencing and RNA/DNA Analysis: Currently, given the unknown nature of the virus and its origins, the global scientific community too is relying on tools that could speed up their research and allow faster dissemination of their findings to relevant communities. Genome sequencing is extremely critical to understanding a virus and its possible mutations, allowing the scope for personalized medicine. Companies like Alibaba and NVIDIA are making available their cloud capabilities to speed up research in this domain. Alibaba’s Genome Sequencing Solution includes viral data genetic screening, evolutionary analysis, protein structure analysis and diagnostic reporting. This is an AI algorithm that runs on the Alibaba Cloud. It can complete diagnosis in just 14 hours, and is capable of screening 20 people simultaneously. The solution can greatly help hospitals, clinics and disease control centres detect false negatives and virus mutations among other anomalies. NVIDIA has made available Parabricks for 90 days to any medical researcher. Parabricks is based on the Genome Analysis Toolkit and uses GPUs to accelerate sequence data by as much as 50 times. Baidu has made its Linearfold algorithm available to global medical research teams to understand faster and predict the virus’ RNA structure. This can greatly help researchers understand how these viruses spread so rapidly.

Diagnostics Initiative: Even as companies and healthcare workers are firefighting the immediate pandemic at hand, a healthcare crisis of this scale hasn’t happened in recent history. The most notable one being the Spanish Flu that happened in 1918. With advanced technologies and an eagerness to collaborate to end this crisis, companies of today are poised to think big. Amazon has launched a global programme – the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative to support its customers working to providing accurate diagnostics solutions to market faster and promote better collaboration across organizations that are working on similar problems. The Seattle-based conglomerate has allocated $20 million to accelerate diagnostic research, innovation, and development towards the collective understanding and detection of COVID-19 and other innovate diagnostic solutions to mitigate future infectious disease outbreaks. Funding will be provided through a combination of AWS in-kind credits and technical support to assist Amazon’s customers’ research teams in harnessing the full potential of the cloud to tackle this challenge.

CT Imaging Solutions: Doctors around the world especially in countries like Italy, Iran and USA are grappling with the sudden increase in numbers of patients. While it reportedly takes 2 weeks to display symptoms, there are several factors that lead to a rapid escalation of severity of these symptoms, causing an unprecedented strain on healthcare systems. Additionally, the severity of symptoms usually narrow down to severe respiratory distress. In such times, rapid CT imaging trained by algorithms could save doctors and radiologists a lot of time diagnosing COVID19 patients – especially since the topography of the lungs of affected patients keeps changing. Alibaba’s cloud-native CT Image Analytics Solution uses deep learning algorithms, trained by data in China, to detect different types of pneumonia, including the variety associated with COVID19. Using the lung segmentation method, it can also compute proportions of lesions and affected volume ratio of lungs to that of the entire lungs. This test takes 3-4 seconds to run, and around 15 seconds to transmit, making it atleast 60 times faster than human detection. This solution is already being used in 160 hospitals in China. Huawei, in association with Huazhong University of Science & Technology and Lanwon Technology, developed AI-assisted Quantitative Medical Image Analysis specifically for COVID19. The solution applies computer vision and medical imaging to segment pulmonary ground glass opacities (GGOs) and lung consolidation – GGOs decrease the amount of air in the lungs, while lung consolidation occurs when the alveoli in the lungs are replaced by liquids or some other kind of substance.

Quantum & High Performance Computing: For large, complex business challenges, high performance computing can be applied. They are mainly used to address specialized challenges such as drug discoveries. Pharma and lifesciences companies around the world are benefiting greatly from quantum computing and AI as they can process complex and large data sets. Alibaba’s Elastic High Performance Computing Solution is especially useful for lifesciences application researchers like Computational Driven Drug Design and AI-Driven Drug Design. IBM, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science & Technology & US Department of Energy among many others is launching the High Performance Computing Consortium which will bring forth an unprecedented amount of computing power—16 systems with more than 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, 34,000 GPUs, and counting — to help researchers everywhere better understand COVID-19, its treatments and potential cures. This will allow researchers to run massive calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modeling.

Conversational & Collaborative Platforms: DingTalk, Alibaba’s cloud-based collaborative communication platform is more commonly associated with enabling live-streaming classes online. Following the COVID19 outbreak, DingTalk now has an International Medical Expert Communication Platform, hosted on Alibaba Cloud. This communication & collaboration platform allows medical workers from across the world to engage with doctors at Chinese hospitals that were at the forefront of battling the virus earlier this year. With video-conferencing and realtime, AI-enabled translation into 11 languages such as Arabic, Bahasa, Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese, a virtual community of medical experts can be built to share queries and experiences. Huawei too has offered a range of communication offerings to Italy including cloud-based communication platform WeLink to facilitate exchange of good practices between healthcare workers in the two nations. Wi-fi networks equipment will be also provided to 10 temporary hospital facilities in order to allow the communication with the other healthcare bodies. Huawei is working with some of its partner to create an ad hoc video conferencing platform capable of ensuring a real-time connection between the hospitals in the red areas and the crisis unit in the region to which it belongs or the designated government body, guaranteeing continuous coordination of the emergency remotely. It will be possible to consult experts from different regions and share patients’ medical files in real time. Microsoft announced that staff of UK’s National Health Service (NHS) can utilise Teams for free. UK too has been seeing a raft of COVID19 cases, placing the NHS staff directly in danger’s way. The purpose of allocating Teams would be to enable more of their medical staff to communicate remotely (even if under isolation or quarantine), and even enable local clinicians to assist at the time of need.