TECH OUTLOOKOctober - 201819The "Cloud First" Approach To Life SciencesBy Sunil Anand, CIO, Jubilant PharmaTraditionally, financial services and pharmaceutical organizations are not early adopters of the cloud. Just over 5 years ago, one would see frowns and dismissive eyes, when cloud vendors would present their value proposition. The world has since, moved on. Some interesting attempts about cloud-adoption suggest that we are willing to decide in favor of the cloud, and some pharmaceutical companies are not holding back. Emails on the cloud (aka Office 365) are common in Pharma, notwithstanding the perceived risk that critical information about products, strategy and litigation is sprinkled all over business email messages.Commercial systems that contain customer contract information, pricing, rebates and chargebacks are being hosted on external data centers, and often on the cloud. So, clearly, technology leaders have assessed that the risks to sensitive business information are not increased by moving them to the cloud. In fact, several companies may have found their in-house data centers rank lower on infrastructure quality, security, vulnerability and disaster recovery. Of course, parameters like up-time, performance and latency are not even in the ballpark. The industry experts in data center management are doing an excellent job.At Jubilant, we are presented a "cloud-first" approach in recent years, to help us focus our premium IT talent on delivering key solutions for the next phase of our growth. It is common to hear pharmaceutical CIOs willing to adopt a cloud-first strategy on their non-GMP systems.For GMP systems, that is far from true. In one of my stints, several cloud-service providers were asked to present their experience in hosting GXP systems. Many of the providers have made several pharma applications available to leverage on the cloud. For example, pharma companies have used such options for complaints management, safety reporting, product label, product registration, eCTD filing, and others. All of these are validated systems, and can be procured on hosted, SaaS and similar models, with references in pharma.The big cloud players have recently started offering GXP services, and are scrambling to better understand the regulatory requirements on computer systems in our industry. So, when you talk to them, alongside your quality assurance staff, some of them bring up theoretical aspects of GXP documentation and procedural practices. Recently, making a suboptimal decision on a vendor with no pharma validation experience, it cost an organization over 12 extra months to complete their validation, apart from the escalated costs. Such costly mistakes can often have much larger implications, including missing compliance goals, making projects unviable, and employee frustration.So, when you are looking for a cloud provider, you would be very particular to understand what they really know, and what can they deliver. A case in point ­ a CIO was asked for advice on taking up an ambitious plan to Sunil AnandCIO INSIGHTS
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