Drug developers, beginning a push beyond the basics of cloud computing, are now looking for ways to move workloads between internal environments and multiple external clouds. There's now a need for an "orchestration layer" that can identify the best cloud offering for a particular task and then provision resources automatically.

CloudSwitch is the maker of such a solution, intended to allow enterprises to run applications in the cloud without re-architecting them or changing management tools. Founder Ellen Rubin notes that drug developers are now less willing to be bound to a particular cloud provider and want to use the offerings of several simultaneously.

The need for multiple providers arises as drug developers expand their use of cloud resources beyond discovery-oriented simulation and modeling tasks to development, testing, and production activities, says Rubin. These additional activities require more high-compute resources, more streamlined procurement, and contract terms more aligned with enterprise requirements.

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