AWS Cloud Financial Management
The benefits of cloud adoption in the life sciences industry
Life sciences organizations are grappling with increased competition and the need to maintain profitability, while navigating a complex regulatory environment. To tackle these challenges, many are migrating to the cloud to accelerate innovation and enhance productivity. The Hackett Group evaluated the business benefits and trends of cloud adoption for life sciences organizations, and uncovered the effects of different cloud strategies on key metrics.
Key benefits across four areas
The study focused primarily on the biotechnology and medical device industries within the larger life sciences sector, and details the quantifiable benefits of moving from on-premises to the cloud across four major themes.
1. Research and discovery
Using cloud solutions, organizations have simplified data management and collaboration, supporting more efficient data management, data-heavy application integration, and automation of lab activities between systems. Adopting the cloud resulted in optimized usage of resources, which accelerated product pipeline. The data also shows that performance steadily improved as the duration on the cloud increased. Some of the cloud adoption benefits across research and discovery include:
– 31% increase in revenue from new products
– 50% increase in product pipeline throughput
2. Clinical development
Clinical trials for life sciences products can last an average of six to seven years, with 80% reporting delays that can cost anywhere from $600,000 to $8 million per day. With the cloud, clinical teams were able to increase collaboration around the world, and streamline their workflows resulting in:
– 19% reduction in time spent qualifying and initiating trial sites
– 20% reduction in time spent analyzing post-trial data
The data showed a correlation between number of applications on the cloud to % change in time to qualify and initiate trial sites. For example, those that migrated seven or more applications reduced their time to qualify and initiate trial sites by 27%, or 29 days saved per trial.
3. Commercialization and manufacturing
It’s vital that life sciences companies meet strict regulations and operational standards. Unexpected manufacturing and IT downtime can cost millions of dollars per day in decreased yields, regulatory fines, and compromised quality, to name a few. The migration of business applications to the cloud resulted in several improvements including:
– 45% increase in new products launched on time
– 27% decrease in unexpected manufacturing downtime
4. Safety and compliance
Life sciences organization are turning to the cloud to understand, accelerate, and streamline their regulatory submission and compliance processes. GxP (Good Practice) compliance ensures that their processes meet strict quality and compliance standards. Organizations that migrated to the cloud reported:
– 12% increase in GxP audit scores
– 7% reduction in spend to manage adverse events
Deep dive into the study
The study also looked at different migration and modernization strategies as they could be applied to life science organizations, and found that the adoption of managed data and analytics platforms helped realize improvements across the most number of KPIs. The study shares several areas of opportunity, benefits, and recommendations for life sciences organizations that can be enabled by cloud solutions.