Cloud migration enables life sciences companies to accelerate innovation and improve market responsiveness. It also helps them to manage data more efficiently, reduce costs and ensure compliance with regulations.
Digital transformation is helping life sciences companies to overcome challenges such as pricing pressures, rising consumer expectations, eroding trust, and internal cultural changes.
Scalability
Cloud computing moves the heavy lifting of crunching and processing data from devices people carry around or work at to huge computer clusters far away in cyberspace. This allows for a radically new way of collaborating with colleagues and customers worldwide.
For example, a hospital-based cloud could enable doctors to easily access their patient’s electronic medical records to quickly identify the best treatment option or enable a pharmaceutical company to access a blinded version of the information to perform research and development.
A scalable platform makes it easier for life sciences companies to develop and deploy analytics use cases across their value chain. This accelerates innovation and improves customer engagement by enabling real-time decision-making.
Reliability
IT Solutions for Life Sciences Businesses in Boston offer the reliability that life sciences companies need to focus on their core business, reducing or eliminating costly downtime due to equipment failure or power outages. In addition, the ability to instantly scale data and workloads is a game-changer. This speeds up product design, build, and ramp-up; enables new alliances to form more quickly; helps get trials in the field faster; and reduces overall time to market.
Moreover, the familiar “infostructure” of the cloud provides a platform for standardized industry processes that enable life sciences businesses to outsource transactional activities and focus on those that genuinely differentiate them. This drives greater collaboration and open innovation and potentially yields new business models. The key to successful adoption is to progress domain and app by app, balancing scalability, resiliency, performance, and other benefits against the risk of disrupting existing processes. By doing so, regulated organizations can achieve the actual value of cloud computing.
Flexibility
With cloud migration, companies can rehost their software and applications onto a third-party platform with minimal changes to the original application and runtime environment. This allows businesses to restructure their IT environments without disrupting business processes and reduces the cost of acquiring and maintaining IT infrastructure.
It also eliminates the need for data centers and hardware, cutting up-front capital expenditures. The flexible, scalable nature of the cloud also makes it easier for life sciences organizations to adapt and evolve their IT systems with new features and capabilities.
Life science research can generate a lot of data and often requires high-performance computing to manipulate and make sense of that data. The healthcare industry has strict privacy, security, and ethical demands for handling Personal Health Information (PHI), so any IT infrastructure that processes that data must meet the highest standards. Cloud scalability and elasticity can quickly handle these needs by allowing researchers to add more computing power and storage capacity.
Security
Life science companies can move beyond the limitations of their current IT infrastructure to drive innovation, collaboration, and transformation. They can rely on cloud computing to handle the complexities of their data, accelerate computation and empower advanced analytics.
In addition to reducing costs, a typical information structure facilitates the development of standard processes. It allows life sciences organizations to outsource transactional activities while focusing on those that generate value. For example, managing medical images is a critical but time-consuming process that can be delegated to a third party.
Similarly, the centralized storage and processing of clinical trial data can also be moved to the cloud. This can help to streamline processes, improve data accessibility and enhance collaboration with external partners. It can even enable a “care cloud” that enables doctors to directly access a blinded version of medical records to support collaborative care. Such a cloud could dramatically improve patient outcomes while lowering administrative costs for life sciences firms.
