Now, it is technically possible to have this data in AWS with assurances of encryption and some sane security measures like not leaving it open to public. However, the big catch is - the compute part of the cluster is on-premise. We did the math of moving the compute to AWS, and it was several orders of magnitude expensive(consider that the group did not need to pay for power, network links, and maintenance of the server room by virtue of being part of the university). The only “extra cost” of being on-premise was my salary, which is substantially small portion of the increase by going to AWS. Also, guess what going to AWS doesn’t magically eliminate the need for a guy whose responsibility it is to ensure the cluster is operated, and for users to come in for help, and to manage the ecosystem in general.
The argument of moving to the cloud is more complicated than it appears on the surface. I believe the HPC shops that have a lot of compute and very little need for elasticity will be the last to head to the cloud.
That restricts you to your own infrastructure then. There are tradeoffs in both directions.
The are also dozens of online databases for all sorts of data from biology.
Reading between the lines, you seem to attach certain ideas to the term „genetics“?
In my old university, the people working on the genome studies had to sign a draconian NDA and they had a dedicated air-gapped compute cluster for it. If your genomics study can produce a patent for a new diagnostic method or maybe even a drug precursor molecule, that'll be way more valuable than everything you spent on security.
And already 8 years ago, hacking attempts by what was thought of as foreign government actors was a common experience in life science research. When I had to give a talk about our methods, we scrambled all the gene IDs for fear of the slides getting leaked.
So based on how people working in that field behave, I presume they would never ever agree to upload the data to servers outside of their control. Accordingly, I can only imagine this service to be used accidentally by inexperienced students (who are then on the hook for violating their NDA).