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Cloud adoption in the pharmaceutical industry is steadily growing despite the posed challenges. Why? Because by embracing the cloud, pharmaceutical providers are able to access scalable storage solutions designed to handle massive amounts of digital information without overstretching IT budgets. Companies like GlaxoSmithKline have reduced their cost by 30% by adopting cloud based solutions and other players like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and Genentech have already begun experimenting with cloud computing. This article looks at the recent successes and provides insight into enabling pharmaceutical workloads on cloud platforms.

The leading pharmaceutical companies have started hosting complex genetic sequences, clinical trials, and biomarker data in the cloud. Cloud based computing is ideal for data storage and analytics of the vast amount of data scientists and biologists generate in research. Eli Lilly is using the cloud to provide high-performance computing and storage to hundreds of its scientists, enabling it to reduce the fixed IT costs without compromising with IT services.

Pharma and Cloud: The Challenges

• Data Set Size: The typical pharmaceutical workloads generate or consume huge amounts of data. The data store is generally collocated with the computation resources. Moving data from an enterprise location to the cloud and back is prohibitively expensive in terms of bandwidth and time. With a 4 Gbps network speed, it would take more than 2 hours to move a 4 TB data set. In data centers and enterprises, the data throughput is typically around 100 Mbps. The cost and actual time for data transmission could undermine this whole approach.
• Regulatory Compliance: In the pharmaceutical industry, there are strict regulations relating to personally identifiable information, where private data can be stored, how and what applications can access that data. One of the challenges is ensuring and proving regulations have been met. Cloud services come with a basic set of capabilities and building blocks to meet these needs. Any solution that has to go through strict due diligence, auditing, and certification processes is a high-cost activity.
• Security Concerns: Another aspect of regulatory compliance that needs to be addressed is the various security levels required of pharmaceutical data: Physical Security, End-point Security, Storage Security, Transport Security, Deletion Security, etc.

Leak of company confidential information must also be addressed. In a multi-tenant environment, its critical to ensure the application accessing data is trusted (signed and certified) and isnt running in a shared environment accessible by another company.

Cloud Applicability and Approaches

To commence, its important to conduct an assessment to figure out which applications and data can be movedkeeping in mind the criticality of the information that needs to be moved.

Data Migration

An easy way to start is to move smaller data footprint workloads. Once the cloud stack is tested and acceptable, larger workloads can be moved to the cloud. The initial input data, currently within the firewall, has to move to the cloud. Once the data is secure on the cloud, it will remain there for future workloads and analysis as the cost for bringing it back is high and counterproductive.

Storage

Any workload and associated data should be checked for data access patterns. If its raw data from a study, the data access could be within a second and may recur frequently in a day. If its patient images, access time may be a few seconds or minutes, but the frequency of access could be once in a few weeks. If data stored is associated with a research query, then the access time can extend to hours and frequency may be 1-2 times per year. With this in mind, tiered storage can be created that has costs corresponding to the retrieval rate and responsiveness required.

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