Lab diary entry no.7: Data safety and cloud computing
In this instalment, R&D software provider, IDBS evaluates data safety and cloud computing.
For pharma companies, nothing is more important than protecting their data and intellectual property (IP). If these were to fall into the wrong hands, the damage could be significant — both financially and in terms of reputation.
The average total cost of a data breach in the global healthcare industry, according to a 2016 survey by IBM,1 is $4 million — a 29% increase in total cost since 2013. With the price of getting it wrong so high, it’s only natural for organisations to take every measure possible to protect their data and their IP. But, instead of locking their data in an in-house Fort Knox, organisations are looking somewhere else entirely. They’re turning to the cloud.
On face value, concerns about data theft or loss might seem completely at odds with the industry moving towards cloud computing. Despite this, 80% of enterprises globally are already using the cloud to store their data,2 and the use of cloud-based solutions is showing few signs of slowing. Why?
More than simply cost-saving
Cloud-based systems are increasingly popular with all kinds of businesses — they simplify deployment processes, they’re popular with IT teams who can use their time more productively elsewhere, they can be up and running pretty quickly and, ultimately, they can cut costs. That’s not the whole picture, though.
Threats to data have never been more evident. Earlier this year, the Swedish government was plunged into crisis after personal information was leaked to outsourcing IT contractors in other countries, who had not yet undergone security checks. In terms of scale, the loss of data was staggering: nearly every single Swedish citizen was affected.
So, what’s this got to do with lab data and the cloud?
Managing outsourcing partners
The scientific landscape is changing, and more and more organisations are turning to external collaboration partners — like contract research organisations (CROs), joint ventures and academic partnerships. As the Swedish government learned, sharing data with organisations outside your firewall can be a messy business. Giving third parties access to your corporate systems by punching through your corporate firewall could make collaborating easier, but it’s not going to help your relationship with your CIO, and it’s definitely not going to keep your IP as secure as it should be.
There are also other challenges. What happens when your contract terminates with your collaboration partner? Have the most recent versions been captured? Will they delete their inbox? Wait... you’re sending data via email? Really?
When security should be paramount, too often collaborative projects see corners cut. By using a cloud-based system, organisations can provide partners with a neutral environment for collaboration, alongside the ability to restrict the access levels available to third parties, meaning private data remains inaccessible and secure.
Ensuring overall security of data
The cloud’s benefits don’t stop at ensuring collaboration projects are secure — and contrary to popular beliefs, an organisation’s business information can be far more secure in a cloud solution than in a traditional software on-premise situation.
Backed by a large web provider, data stored in the cloud can be protected by the most advanced security measures available, many of which are simply out of reach for organisations working on their own or using in-house or on-premise technology. Data centres are manned 24/7/365 (we did mention Fort Knox earlier…), access can be restricted to certain IP address ranges and intrusion detection systems can identify and block any malicious traffic.
The recent hurricanes in the Caribbean and Florida have also highlighted the importance of disaster recovery — if data is stored in one location, it risks being lost forever. By providing two separate geographical locations, cloud providers can store and identically mirror all data. And should anything happen to one of these locations, operations automatically pass to the secondary data centre, meaning no downtime and, more importantly, no data loss.
Organisations are right to be concerned about the safety and security of their data, and given the high stakes involved, it is only right for businesses to be vigilant (and even sceptical) when considering how and where to manage data — but when it comes to new technologies, staying away can sometimes be more damaging that staying put.
It might be time to change your perception of the cloud…
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