The future of pharma depends on the cloud – and secure data

When hackers stole Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine data last year during a cyberattack on Europe’s medicines regulator, the breach was simply the latest in a long line of cybercrimes against medical organizations.

Attempts to illicitly access data inside pharmaceutical and other medical organizations increased during COVID-19, yet even before the pandemic struck, accessing datasets on drug and medicine development was high on hackers’ wish lists.

In 2020, a study by IBM put the average cost of a data breach for a pharmaceutical business at $5.1 million, placing the sector behind only healthcare, energy and financial industries in terms of suffering the biggest costs.

More than half of the breaches recorded against pharma businesses were the result of malicious attacks and the cost of a pharma breach was almost double the average cost across all business types, where incidents cost an average of $3.86 million per breach.

Outlining how the pharmaceutical industry could secure its networks to avoid cyberattacks, Forbes highlighted a “serious vulnerability around the compromise of identities and privileged access that can result from operating in constantly scaling hybrid and multicloud environments known as the cloud permissions gap.”

The growing dependence of large-scale enterprise on the cloud, hybrids, and multivendor environments, has expanded the avenues a malicious breach could take. With data use more necessary than ever, computing solutions are needed that integrate quickly and easily with existing infrastructure to enable speedy innovation without compromising safety or data security.

Big data analytics will improve patient care, but greater data management is also needed. Cloud-native transformation across the pharmaceutical sector requires partnerships with specialist organizations to optimize the use of open-source technologies.

As a leader in intelligent edge computing solutions, SUSE is perfectly placed to support the use of lightweight Linux, Kubernetes, and storage products for x86 or Arm hardware within the pharma industry.

Scaling Kubernetes solutions means you don’t have to choose between speed and security. You can innovate without compromising your data. With SUSE Rancher, unify all clusters to ensure consistent operations, workload management, and enterprise-grade security – from core to cloud to edge.

SUSE’s adaptable Linux OS, container management, observability, networking, and storage brings everything you need for a data-driven, competitive advantage.

As you democratize data throughout your organization, customize treatments, and run at-home clinical trials, you will need to deploy and manage solutions reliably and securely in environments with limited computing power or connectivity.

With SUSE, gain the openness and interoperability needed to overhaul your supply chain for a digital future, strengthen R&D and ROI with stable and secure technology that helps futureproof your organization.

If you would like to talk to one of our experts or simply discover more about the way SUSE can bring resilience to your organization, please get in touch.