3 min read
Most of the life sciences companies now face increasing consumer, portfolio, regulatory and operating challenges on a daily basis as they carry on their search for innovative health solutions. In order to create and sustain competitive differentiation and market dominance, the life sciences sector must meet the diverse challenges of your regulatory/life cycle strategy today while supporting innovations of tomorrow.
CLOUD COMPUTING: UNDERSTANDING THE CLOUD HEMISPHERE
The super cool tech word heard in all industries today is ‘The Cloud’. However most of us are concerned about the security and scared about the fringe guarding the cloud with your data in it. Few of the questions around the cloud have been addressed as below.
This article addresses to study the rise of cloud computing in the emerging life sciences domain including biotech and pharmaceutical sectors. The main objective has however been to determine the effects of cloud computing and the business impacts in an increasing global and competitive environment.
WHY SHOULD THE PHARMACY INDUSTRY EMBRACE THE CLOUD?
Cloud computing finds it applications fitting into the picture perfect pharmaceutical regulatory industry because of the following reasons
- Ever-growing datasets
- Unpredictable work packets and traffic patterns
- Demand for faster responses
- Reduced time to market
- Business continuity
WHAT IS STOPPING THE TRANSITION?
Regulatory bodies scrutinize enormous amounts of sensitive and confidential data. Cloud services have been deemed a mystery status when it comes to the visibility and security levels. Data in the cloud moves between various centres for various reasons load balancing, redundancy maintenance etc thus not making it a viable option for heavily regulated industries like the Pharma regulatory.
Especially the language of the legislation has always been slow to catch up with the sociotechnological shifts. This in turn makes it more challenging for the industry and the regulators to embrace new ways of maintaining the massive volumes of data in the wake of uncertainty if the new approach is either by letter or by spirit messing with the laws.
WHAT IS THE ACTUAL GAP?
Finding and presenting the framework explaining the relation between the cloud provider and the customer has been an open challenge for the whole industry. Cloud providers are at large misinterpreted as “Outsourcing Providers”. Existing regulations dictate the interaction between service provider and their outsourcing partners, thereby impacting the ability of engaging with cloud providers. Despite of increasingly sophisticated virtual networks, many existing rules in regulated industries are mostly obsolete or hold little relevance to the security norms and standards for the new age technology.
WHERE TO START MIGRATION OF DATA TO THE CLOUD?
Not everything that is IT related about an organization has to move onto a cloud. However taking time out to segment the existing datasets and concerned work packets on criteria like frequency of change, sensitivity enables the customer to effectively use the complementary solutions available in a big data environment.
WHAT TO LOOK INTO AND HOW TO SELL CLOUD?
The cloud providers need to dive deep into potential customer requirements and understand the legislation that governs various aspects around the targeted market, specific to the client requirement and provide more insights on the relevant procedures followed.
Recommending deployment models and identifying the operational and organizational benefits would create an impact. Self-certifying the cloud would sell the confidence on the cloud solution as well as the infrastructure. Additionally explain the analogies around the cloud (these analogies on the cloud or the cloud services are unlikely to change anywhere in the near future).
BOTTOM LINE: UNDERUTILIZATION OF CLOUD SERVICES
Cloud services are being highly underutilised due to lack of transparency of security, capabilities and out-of-date legislations. It’s time the Cloud service providers put to paper descriptions of the capabilities, features of their data centres also focussing on the legislation governing the target market to enable the customer learn and educate others to make right choices.
CONCLUSION
The Cloud provides increased opportunities for more efficient business operations, collaboration and innovation, but regulatory concerns continue to be a challenge for life science companies. Freyr collaborates with clients globally to drive growth, maximize pipeline productivity to deliver and improve customer interactions. Freyr’s software centre of excellence is capable of providing cloud based regulatory compliance software solutions and services that can manage clinical and business applications simply and efficiently.
