The cloud offers unique IT solutions but as yet the pharmaceutical
industry has failed to maximise its potential. By identifying and
adopting the right model, companies can ensure than even the most
critical of data is stored securely.
The pharmaceutical industry has changed dramatically over the past 10
years, as a shrinking drug pipeline and customer base combined with a
poor economic climate, have seen costs sky-rocket and profits dwindle.
To compound issues further, the pharmaceutical industry has had to
struggle with an exponential rise in data that is being generated from
increasingly complex research studies and analysis of customer
interactions.
To cope with these issues, pharmaceutical organisations have been
looking to the IT industry to deliver technologies which will help
increase research and backoffice efficiency, as well as provide a more
flexible and scalable IT infrastructure. This is where cloud computing
comes in. Heralded by many as the ultimate solution for businesses
needing to develop more flexible, powerful and scalable IT
infrastructures, cloud is quickly becoming the must-have platform across
all industries. However, even though some pharmaceutical companies,
such as Eli Lilly and Pfizer, have taken steps towards cloud adoption,
the pharmaceutical industry as a whole is lagging behind and failing to
realise the full benefits of cloud (1,2). So the question is, with cloud
offering the ideal solution to the global pharmaceutical market’s
problems, what is holding organisations back from adoption and more
importantly, what can be done to encourage this?
Laying the Foundations
Despite a general industry hesitancy, several areas of the
pharmaceutical industry have already taken their first tentative steps
into the cloud and have highlighted the benefits on offer, including:
More Space for Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)
If there is one area that has been calling out for a cloud-like solution, it is NGS.
Industry research models have evolved from small to large molecules
and, as a result, the amount of information generated during a single
experiment has exploded to hundreds of petabytes or even zettabytes
worth of data, making research more complex and difficult to manage. A
cloud infrastructure offers an infinite virtual environment for this
information to be stored and analysed, helping pharmaceutical companies
reduce the cost of drug discovery while also improving innovation
capabilities.
Sharing of Research Data
Collaboration is key to driving innovation, but this can be
incredibly difficult when teams are dealing with such large amounts of
information. The cloud provides the perfect tool in a single, scalable
environment, where individuals from multiple team, organisations or even
different countries can share materials and ideas. To this end, some of
the largest pharmaceutical companies have formed an industry body
called The Pistoia Alliance to help drive the seamless sharing of
research data. The Pistoia Alliance is working on a five-year initiative
to standardise pharmaceutical vocabulary to enable more successful data
exchange. The organisation has established a cloudbased electronic
laboratory notebook that multiple organisations across the globe can
access and contribute to.
Customer Information Analysis
Businesses are increasingly turning to social networking ‘chatter’ as
they seek to extract useful customer information to develop more
successful sales and marketing campaigns. Though the pharmaceutical
sector may not be as advanced as some, it too is looking to harness
online conversations, such as those between physicians and patients or
those on customer forums. However, in order for companies to address
these new methods of communication, they need to have access to new
listening, engagement and analytics capabilities, which can require a
substantial IT investment. This is where the flexibility of cloud tools,
such as Veeva Systems’ CRM offering based on Force.com and Microsoft
Dynamics CRM on-demand, can provide businesses with ‘as-a-service’ tools
that negates the need for a large investment.
Barriers to Cloud Adoption and Overcoming the Challenges
So, with the benefits of cloud being discussed across the world and
initial pharmaceutical implementations offering positive results, why
isn’t the industry seeing more rapid adoption? The primary answer is
that the data that so desperately requires this new environment is often
deemed too sensitive for the cloud. When it comes to hosting
competitive intelligence or confidential customer information, many
pharmaceutical companies still view the risk of information being hacked
as too high.
In order to tackle this, companies need to fully investigate the
range of cloud models on offer, so they can understand where best to
store their information. For example, the public cloud is often seen as
the cheapest model, offering businesses a shared environment where they
can store their data. However, as its name suggests, the public cloud
provides services or software on a network that can be accessed by a
range of parties, leaving sensitive information more easily accessed by
others. At the other end of the scale is the private cloud, which offers
an altogether more suitable location for confidential information, as
it is completely hosted on a company’s own network. In an industry as
heavily regulated as the pharmaceutical sector, the ability to protect
information from external sources is not only important for maintaining a
competitive advantage, but is also critical in keeping businesses
compliant. A private cloud model provides companies with the tools
needed to tackle regulations, which require pharmaceutical companies to
be able to control and monitor who has access to critical data. By
having in place the right cloud environment and supporting data
protection with additional tools, such as Access Management software or
encryption and tokenisation devices that protect information while in
transit, pharmaceutical businesses can be confident that their most
sensitive information is kept safe.
Another issue impacting cloud adoption is that for many of the
largest pharmaceutical companies the initial hardware and software
license investment can be seen as too expensive, despite the promises of
return on investment. With many of the global brands, such as Johnson
& Johnson which employs 114,000 staff in 175 countries, the cost of
rolling-out a cloud infrastructure would be incredibly high (3). And
yet, it is these huge corporations that stand to profit the most from
the efficiency and collaboration benefits that cloud offers. This is
where ‘as-a-service’ cloud offerings come into their own, with
platform-as-a-service (PaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS) and
business-process-asa- service (BPaaS), helping to move large parts of
the value chain to an operational expenditure rather than a capital
expenditure. It is not just the initial setup costs that are reduced
with this model, but also the long-term maintenance and upgrade costs,
which are made much quicker and more cost effective in a virtual
environment.
Conclusion
Cloud computing is opening up a world of possibilities for the
pharmaceutical industry, both in terms of cost and efficiency savings,
and is also helping the sector rekindle its dwindling drug pipeline
through more effective collaboration and information sharing. The
industry has already seen some great examples of what cloud can offer,
such as Pfizer’s recent cloud implementation which aims to deliver
real-time information to the global sales team (4). However, relying on
small pockets of cloud will not work in the long term. The industry
cannot afford to let concerns over security hold it back from adopting
cloud on a wider level.
References
- Eli Lilly On Cloud Computing Reality, Information Week, 13th November, 2010, http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/data_centers/228200755
- How Pfizer Uses Cloud Computing for R&D Projects, Bio Pharma, 11th June, 2010, http://biopharmadirectory.com/news/?p=159
- Johnson & Johnson, http://www.jnj.com/connect/about-jnj/
- Callidus Software news room, 14th September, 2011, http://www/.callidussoftware.com/templates/newspress.aspx?id=4920
