LIVERPOOL technology company, AIMES Grid Services, has secured £150,000 in funding from the government-backed Technology Strategy Board for a cloud computing project that will benefit the UK’s medical research community.

Known as the Shared-Services Health Applications and Resources Environment (SHARE) project, its purpose is to open up private cloud services for the benefit of UK health research, specifically around children’s health.

Issues of trust and patient data security have so far limited the application of a cloud model to the storage and processing of sensitive data, preventing the UK’s health research community from exploiting the cost and scalability benefits afforded by cloud computing.

Working in collaboration with the MRC Centre of Epidemiology, part of the University College of London’s Institute of Child Health, AIMES is providing a cloud infrastructure that will provide access to third party information services on a commercial basis via secure connections for the first time.

The project’s innovation was recognised by the Technology Strategy Board when it was awarded funding as part of a national competition aimed at encouraging British companies to launch collaborative projects that will accelerate the development of more secure and trustworthy information services.

Prof Dennis Kehoe, chief executive of AIMES, said: “At the moment, the health informatics community is in a vicious circle. Research organisations can’t readily adopt a commercial cloud computing approach until the security of such an architecture is proven, and the security cannot be demonstrated until a real-life implementation is established.

“It’s well known that national funding competitions of this kind attract a deluge of applications, and to come through this process successfully is an endorsement of the technical expertise and facilities we’re developing here at AIMES.”