The Pharmaceutical industry as a whole is expanding its technology portfolio in several key areas, including the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. A recent report from GlobalData reveals that this accelerated adoption is being met with an increase in investment in security solutions.
The survey found that 79% of pharmaceutical companies are currently making investments in Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions. 72% of companies are considering starting to invest or investing more in IAM over the next two years.
GlobalData’s findings covered a host of different security solutions, including end-point, database, application, and network securities as well as content and web filtering, backup and archive, and others.
Across the board, pharma companies surveyed indicated they were investing in every category. Most of the respondents indicated they were planning to invest more in the near future.
As more companies adopt IoT and artificial intelligence to gather, process, and act on data at scale, the need to secure this data increases. This includes information about the products the pharmaceutical industry works with, as well as any customers or vendors it does business with.
Siddharth Kumar Tiwari, Technology Analyst at GlobalData, explains: “Investments in IAM solutions among pharmaceutical companies are driven by the need to manage electronic user identities and ensure data privacy while avoiding any misuse of critical business information.”
In recent months, several of the largest cloud providers have announced new initiatives to drive the healthcare industry to the cloud. Microsoft Azure, for example, recently released a host of new tools specially suited for organizations that work with medical data and patient records.
Oracle’s Clinical One solution creates what it calls an all-in-one solution for clinical trials taking new medications from conception to market from a centralized platform.
The US National Science Foundation has also created a new program with the help of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to offer cloud computing services for scientific research. An initiative that pharmaceutical researchers will undoubtedly be drawn to.
By 2019, research firm Gartner predicts over 75% of life science R&D IT organizations will adopt a cloud-first application deployment strategy. The cloud is a hotbed of activity in the medical sector. This latest round of investment by cloud providers and pharmaceutical companies serves as evidence that the world of medicine is no exception.
