By Raj Srinivasaraghavan
The cloud is engulfing more sectors, faster and deeper. Health and pharmaceuticals are an exception. Rather, the two sectors have been early adopters of the cloud and other futuristic technologies. Rather than being an enabler, the cloud has now become an inevitable technology for the industry in general and for new drug development in particular.
According to Gartner, by 2025, more than 30% of new drugs and materials will be systematically discovered using generative AI techniques. Gartner also estimates that more than 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms by 2025, up from 30% in 2021. These metrics strongly demonstrate that life sciences and pharmaceutical companies are moving towards the cloud in a big way.
The power of cloud utilization is helping pharmaceutical companies in general in four areas. The first is the drug supply chain in which the drug manufacturing, distribution, third-party packaging, and retail store distribution are cloud-enabled. The supply chain is a critical process for any pharmaceutical company as it has to effectively track and trace products across all continents to improve results. It comes down to how quickly a batch, batch, or even a single tablet can be located in a supply chain that involves manufacturing, distribution, packaging, and global retail distribution. The cloud helps a lot through business software like SAP installed in the public/private/hybrid cloud of pharmaceutical companies. Also ancillary processes like inventory management, shipment tracking through IOT devices like scanners connected to Cloud Edge Locations help global track and trace, especially on a global scale for some of these companies. Additionally, service-oriented cloud deployments help report these numbers to government authorities instantly, especially at border ports, when the need arises, for compliance purposes, so that the supply chain can run smoothly.
Second, it is the drug discovery involving hundreds of scientists and engineers for a single drug development process. Agility and speed are critical. It is an aspect that is receiving a late critical look, especially after the covid pandemic. According to a recent report, some global pharmaceutical companies were seeking to develop effective drugs for viruses, with mashup algorithms combining hundreds of chemical compounds, each of different ratios, with the help of AI and machine learning. Such efforts are only possible through cloud servers that can handle payloads of large volumes of combinatorial data. The cloud, with its ability to automatically scale from hundreds to thousands of servers on demand, has improved the ability of pharmaceutical companies to come up with drug combinations at a rapid pace. It is good to note here that all of this can be done without compromising data security, privacy, or performance by making use of cloud-native components like containers, gateways, routers, and firewalls and by effectively distributing the modeling activity. between public, private or hybrid cloud.
The third area is business processes, both internal and external, where the cloud ensures efficient delivery across all departments such as marketing, sales, HR management, clinical trials, etc. It is imperative that a modern pharmaceutical company (including SMEs) seek help. of deployments in the cloud for business processes. Various avenues such as Paas, Business Process as a Service, all cloud based SaaS software have helped companies greatly reduce their IT expenses and run their processes very efficiently. Again, the availability of on-demand software and cloud resources helps them gain control over the scale of these deployments. This mitigates risk and delivers quality, cost-optimized innovation in these business processes, especially in clinical trials that can be difficult to manage.
The fourth area is collaboration between pharmaceutical companies, whether for commercial or scientific reasons. Pharmaceutical companies are taking advantage of the cloud to increase their efficiency. Hybrid cloud helps a lot here as organizations can share only what is needed. In this way, they can achieve business and technology goals without compromising data security or privacy.
In summary, cloud deployment provides added value in the form of instant scalability, incremental costs, cloud-native tools, on-demand availability, continuous monitoring, geo-accessibility, data protection, compliance, device connectivity, high manageability of payload and service. cum process-driven architecture.
Raj Srinivasaraghavan, CTO, SecureKloud Technologies.
(DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by ETHealthworld. ETHealthworld.com shall not be liable for any damage caused to any person or organization directly or indirectly.)
