Written by: Alan Louie, Research Director, Life Sciences, IDC Health Insights, and Michael Townsend, Research Director, Life Sciences Commercial Strategies, IDC Health Insights

The increasingly collaborative nature of the life sciences, along with a complex data and regulatory ecosystem, has driven leading innovators to embrace the cloud. With IT support and application support redefined as noncore competencies, companies are forging strong partnerships with leading cloud providers.

IDC estimates that worldwide public IT cloud services revenue (industry agnostic) will reach $194.5 billion in 2019 and is expected to increase at at Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21.9% through 2016–2021. Additionally, in IDC's 2018 CloudView Survey of multiple industries, over 70% of life science IT executives surveyed agreed that Cloud computing/SaaS solutions providers can offer better security than what their own organization's IT security teams can provide, while only 3% disagreed.