The genomic revolution has led to a significant drop in the cost of sequencing of entire organisms including humans. This has led to a better understanding of the basic building blocks of life, diseases and increased medical knowledge. In turn, this has resulted in a plethora of new diagnostics tests and drugs. In particular advances in medical technologies such as medical imaging, molecular modeling and therapeutic devices have led to an exponential growing data deluge in the life sciences. As a result, organizations are spending millions of dollars on IT infrastructure and IT support both on-premises and in the Cloud to store, analyze and access this data. Many of these organizations lack a dedicated research IT infrastructure and scientific IT support, their existing enterprise IT is ill prepared to deal with scientific workflows resulting in a large gap between science and IT. This is because IT has traditionally been the group that manages only the business and enterprise systems for an organization such as desktop support, email, web-services, HR, or databases. The consequence of this lack of a dedicated research IT within an organization is impacting the research of scientists and labs at different levels, from day to day IT related activities, to advanced scientific computing needs for large-scale analytics, to collaboration and data exchange with peers both within and outside of the organization.
