The recent surge in ransomware attacks against cloud hosting platforms has left many organizations scratching their heads, wondering about the security of their systems. When cyber-attacks are used to compromise hosted systems, it impacts data and can also expose critical customer data. Unlike in the past, where ransomware was used target organizations and their systems, malicious individuals are now targeting cloud systems of big cloud service providers. Like never before, the challenge posed by these threats has proven to be growing. According to statistics by the FBI, US businesses lost more than $3 million as payment of ransom to hackers in 2018 alone. This does not include lost businesses, wages, data, and time that were lost in the process.

Over the past few months, it has become clear that technology can do many things than we had initially imagined. From meetings to working from home and ordering items, groceries of food, we can now do almost everything while seated at our comfortable couches at home. All these became clear after the coronavirus pandemic. Since the beginning of this unprecedented transition, cloud businesses have benefited the most. This came as companies increasingly moved their data and information to a digital platform so that they can continue dispensing services even as their physical premises remain closed.

As cloud computing continues attracting the attention of many industries and disciplines, life sciences appear to be taking the right strides towards the use of cloud computing platforms. The greatest benefit of this technology in this discipline is its scalability, innovation, and flexibility. The cloud-based technologies give life sciences the capability to access more resources and processing scale. With the cloud, datasets can be anonymized and shared with ease. This will be a great enabler of the new strategies on artificial intelligence, which include drug discovery. However, some experts have warned that the cloud will not automatically create benefits, reduce costs, or enhance security, that is one of the requirements in any discipline. It is upon each organization or user to determine the processes that can be removed through a transition to the cloud and the new capabilities that can be accessed through the cloud platforms.