Large biomedical datasets, such as those from genomics and imaging, are increasingly being stored on commercial and institutional cloud computing platforms. This is because cloud-scale computing resources, from robust backup to high-speed data transfer to scalable compute and storage, are needed to make these large datasets usable. However, one challenge for large-scale biomedical data on the cloud is providing secure access, especially when datasets are distributed across platforms. While there are open Web protocols for secure authentication and authorization, these protocols are not in wide use in bioinformatics and are difficult to use for even technologically sophisticated users.
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