Cloud computing, one of the best advances to happen in the information technology (IT), has emerged as a core capability for pharmaceutical sector. With more and more companies moving on to cloud platform and enjoying better scalability, flexibility and responsiveness, it is all set to be a compelling choice for the life sciences sector in the days to come.

While companies understand the importance of adopting digital practices, the path to transformation poses many hurdles like regulation, financial factors as well as conventional processes. This is where cloud computing can come to their rescue. Cloud computing can help pharmaceutical companies increase revenue, improve quality and save time.

Over past few months, we have seen trends of bigger pharmaceutical companies acquiring smaller ones, for example Sun Pharma’s acquisition of Ranbaxy. The demand for better data management and analytics is only expected to grow. With all the new challenges that these trends create, cloud computing is a technology that pharmaceutical companies cannot afford to miss.

According to a report by Accenture sometime back, cloud computing has gone “from an intriguing idea to a core capability so quickly that leading life sciences companies are approaching new systems architectures with a ‘cloud first’ mentality”. Whether it is moving to a new market or developing a product, cloud has started playing a significant role for the life sciences company.

The report says that IaaS growth will increase and PaaS will “become the primary approach for application development”. Pharma companies would also be able to extend their cloud strategies to research and development, commercial, supply chain and enterprise functions.
Pfizer has already developed (with Accenture) a cloud-based platform for clinical data aggregation and reporting designed to improve collaboration with clinical research organisations. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is already being used by many life sciences companies to create scalable and highly available information technology infrastructures to store, compute and share data.

Leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are developing and harnessing cloud solutions to address operational efficiency, security, scalability and compliance. The cloud also helps to manage users, data sources and other providers to enable seamless aggregation of data monitoring and clinical trial portfolios in real-time.

Cloud computing is the way to go for pharmaceutical firms. There are so many reasons why pharmaceutical companies should migrate to cloud? Reasons are several. Following are some of them:
 
Reduced cost
A majority of cloud users have seen considerable cost reduction as a result of using cloud-based software and infrastructure. First of all it requires only less development and testing resources, which in turn reduces the expenditure for support and maintenance of applications as well. According to studies, cloud-based software can bring down costs by 50 per cent as compared to traditional software applications over a 10-year period. Another major advantage is saving time; normally cloud-based software will be ready for use within six months, whereas in-house hosted apps will take one to three years to be developed and well tested before deployment.
 
Improved efficiency
Cloud applications can automate all those critical business processes. By removing manual activities and duplicate data, it will help your product hit the market much faster. Cloud can also let you to improve collaboration and integration between various departments, suppliers and distributors. Once businesses are in possession of access to wide range of data, they can gain valuable and crucial insights about the performance systems and plan their future strategy accordingly. You can also avail insights into capacity, availability and relationship between employees, equipment and materials. Your real-time capability to gauge the ground reality helps you operate in an efficient manner and take prudent and better decisions.
 
Decentralization
When a company aspires to go global, it needs the decentralisation of clinical trials, workforces and its information technology infrastructure. Setting up exclusive data centres is not only expensive, it can also distract a pharmaceutical company from concentrating on its core business. Cloud computing betters web performance for users in remote locations without the need to have additional data centres.
 
Flexibility
A major challenge pharmaceutical companies face is the need to rapidly structure their physical infrastructure and scale up or down certain requirements to improve operations. Applications hosted on site are not quick to structure, expand and scale up processes. Unless earnest efforts are made on time, such a situation can cause immense loss to the company. Cloud can help a pharmaceutical company deploy scalable information technology infrastructure which will enable it to quickly adapt to the new environment, ensuring that the resources are always available as per the requirement. Thus, it helps companies adapt to new market requirements at a faster pace. It also helps to check money being spent on resources that remain under-utilized.
 
Security
There have been security concerns about cloud computing for a while. Such apprehensions were shared not only by pharmaceutical companies but also by the entire manufacturing sector. But, today such fears are allayed by the fact that cloud-hosted data is far more secure than data hosted on site and it is quite accessible. Cloud computing allows applications to run independently of hardware through a virtual environment running out of secure data centres. This allows employees to access same documents and apps anywhere, breaking barriers of geography and converting any place into a virtual “office”.

These are only a few of the many benefits that cloud computing offers to pharmaceutical companies. There are a lot more a cloud-based technology can contribute in improving a pharmaceutical company’s long-term return on investment. Cloud computing can help pharmaceutical companies develop innovative products like personalized medicines by improved customer engagement techniques to gather data for effective marketing.

 
(Author is chairman of 8K Miles, a leading cloud solutions company based in US)