Biotechnology and life sciences

We live in a world that witnesses new technological advancements almost every other day. No matter the size, type, or industry type, every organization is integrated into technology, in one form or the other.

However, there’s one such sector that highlights a significantly lower rate of technological adoption. The Biotechnology sector has been the slowest in adopting and integrating high-tech features. Why? The answer’s simple, this industry is heavily regulated under the rules and norms, as laid out by the government.

Given such lower adoption rates, the sector has been one of the slowest adopters of technology.

The Current Scenario of Biotechnology

The list of the latest Biotech technologies to kick off digital adoption is the revolutionary cloud computing feature. Cloud facilities have allowed advanced collaborations in the telemedicine industry, which has gained massive popularity in the current pandemic.

Technologies such as AI and machine learning make full use of this cloud ecosystem and help in faster disease analysis and better medicine recommendations for the early recovery of the patients.

Further, the industry has also witnessed many healthcare apps and services that actively use cloud services to connect medical practitioners with distant patients.

Let’s look into a detailed study of how cloud computing is changing the healthcare industry.

Importance of Cloud Computing in the Biotech Industry

Biotechnology, armed with the power of cloud computing, can bring about the most groundbreaking discoveries. Cloud computing has a variety of applications in the healthcare industry, with a few vital ones mentioned below:

• High Performance: The healthcare industry has witnessed several advancements over the past decade. Somehow, it has reached a saturation point and needs something drastically new to ensure that innovations can occur in this space.

  That’s the exact gap that cloud services are currently playing by providing computational power beyond imagination. These cloud arrangements can easily handle large datasets and improve the performance of the entire sector. Analyzing data sets and getting valuable insights are no more a hurdle for innovation.

• Security: Cloud infrastructures are known for their security. For example, in the current scenario of Covid vaccine distributions, if the data about these are accessed, it can be precious for the hackers worth several million.

  Therefore, to face such a challenge, multi-factor authentication processes are implemented in different layers of the framework to ensure that hackers are not able to enter the system.

• Scalability: The cloud platform provides immense flexibility to the entire system, so much so that the output or the resources can be scaled out whenever required without facing any problems. This is achieved by using storage optimized cloud nodes, which can increase the output by storing data in an external cloud cluster.

Further, users can also scale their operations by adding or deleting nodes from that cluster whenever required.

• Cloud Storage: Medical sector has to deal with a large variety of data, and this leads to the requirement of large storage spaces. Having scalable cloud storage available ensures that all the data can be stored securely without any problem.
• Backup and Replication: Another benefit of storing data in the cloud is that data can never be removed or deleted by any unauthorized body. Even if some fault occurs at the storage end, a backup or a copy of that data is always stored, which can be easily accessed. So, there is no fear of losing valuable data.

What is GxP compliance, and why is it important?

GxP is a group of norms that is coined and referred to by international health organizations like the FDA (American Food and Drug Administration), EMA (European Medicines Agency), and ISO (International Organization of Standardization). The ‘x’ in GxP stands for various activities in the medical industry like GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice), GDP (Good Distribution Practice), and many more.

GxP sets up benchmarks to ensure that the industries function properly while following all the guidelines, focusing on people, procedure, product, and equipment. Following GxP helps in the proper planning of the different production processes and helps in delivering quality products.

GxP compliance refers to the act of following these predetermined standards while carrying out different operations in biotechnological innovations. For an industry to be a GxP compliant industry, one has to provide services that abide by the various notified bodies and regulators worldwide.

Conclusion

Biotechnological innovation has been booming with the introduction of cloud services along with pre-existing medical services. But to get the most out of this medical industry has to follow the GxP norms to produce standardized products that are accepted worldwide. Several GxP compliance consultant advise manufacturers on how to plan the production process to stay in front of the competition.