BT and Exostar, LLC announced that Exostar is joining the BT for Life Sciences ecosystem as a Strategic Member.  The two companies will be working closely together to enable Exostar’s federated identity solutions to ensure life sciences organisations receive seamless, secure access to the BT for Life Sciences cloud compute platform.

Health datasets are increasingly used in drug development, clinical trials and health analytics. In addition, new legislation means that pharmaceutical companies need to give stakeholder access to clinical trials data, which are often sensitive. BT for Life Sciences has already launched solutions which provide scientists easy and effective access to the rich sources of information, based on its innovative cloud-based infrastructure. These are available today on a global basis.

The next step in the BT for Life Sciences evolution brings a leading industry-standard method of securing access to these solutions and associated information, enabling a secure ecosystem approach to life sciences collaboration. To take that next step, BT for Life Sciences is teaming with Exostar, a leading provider of cloud-based identity and access management solutions for the life sciences industry. Ecosystem users may be ‘in-house’ employees, come from collaborative organizations involved in drug research and development, or from other agencies such as regulators.

BT and Exostar aim to deliver a joint proposition that leverages their respective capabilities to address the secure, federated collaboration challenges of the life sciences market. Exostar will be providing their cloud-based identity and access management solution suite, anchored by the Exostar Life Sciences Identity Hub.  Organisations connect once to the Identity Hub, which provides them with trusted pathways to the assets of all of their partners in the community, and vice versa.  Individuals benefit from a single sign-on user experience that allows them to use one credential to access the applications and information they need to collaborate productively and securely.

The combination of BT for Life Sciences, the BT Cloud Compute platform, and Exostar’s Life Sciences Identity Hub aims to permit easy, rapid and safe access to existing solutions. It will also enable the future development of virtual ‘scientist workbenches’ tailored to various disciplines such as Bioinformatics and Cheminformatics. The mutual goal of both companies is to let the scientist focus on the science and not have to worry about the complexities of secure information management, particularly in a cloud environment that crosses enterprise boundaries.

“BT and Exostar have complementary service offerings whose combination delivers exceptional value to life sciences organisations,” said Vijay Takanti, Exostar’s vice president of security and collaboration.  “The pairing of BT’s global life sciences solution platform with Exostar’s expertise in deploying cloud-based federated identity solutions to the life sciences community is a force multiplier that will accelerate time-to-market for life-saving drugs, therapies, and treatments that save lives.”

Yury Rozenman, business development director, BT for Life Sciences, said, “Building on the launch of BT for Life Sciences in 2012, we are excited that our collaboration with Exostar is bringing new innovations to the Life Sciences industry. By making it easier for scientists to collaborate securely when working with sensitive data and systems, we can help to enable transformative approaches to healthcare. Working together, BT and Exostar are giving scientists efficient and cost-effective access to truly empowering technologies, whilst respecting the security and confidentiality challenges that they face.”