Overview
Visibility and Protection Throughout the Pharmaceutical Environment
Pharmaceuticals are a combination of multiple functions-almost like mini-industries-all part of a sophisticated drug development and delivery supply chain. Composed of research divisions, clinical trial groups, manufacturing, and sales and support organizations, each has their own specialized application services, business objectives, and operational challenges. Digital advancements in AI, automation, robotics, and more are transforming how they bring new drugs to market faster. One thing they have in common is their dependence on secure, always-on networks.
Imagine a disruption in the laboratory information management system (LIMS) tracking incubation of a material in the lab; or an outage in the clinical trial management system (CTMS) when patient data was being collected for a decentralized clinical trial; or there is a slowdown that requires restarting one of the factory’s automated robotic assembly lines impacting the latest blockbuster drug valued at a million dollars a shift in production; or a security breach that threatens intellectual property, the safety of a clinical trial, or the resilience of the corporate network. The imperative for end-to-end observability for performance, availability, and security couldn’t be clearer.
| Digital Transformation | Use Case |
|---|---|
| Cloud and AI | Vaccine and drug development |
| Advanced analytics | R&D optimization |
| AI and robotics | Molecule screening and autonomous labs |
| Wearables and real-world data | Personalized medicine and adaptive trials |
| IoT and digital twins | Smart manufacturing and predictive maintenance |
| Mobile apps and sensors | Patient engagement and remote monitoring |
| Start-up collaborations | Digital health acceleration and co-development |
Credit: Svitla
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Challenges
The Challenges of Preventative Strategies in Pharmaceutical Networks
Time Lost with Reactive Troubleshooting Delays Getting Lifesaving Drugs to Market Faster
Unplanned downtime and degradations are serious dangers to research and development, supply chain management, and manufacturing. Pharmaceutical IT teams lack proactive, preventative troubleshooting tools to identify issues before they delay release of critical medications.
Lack of End-to-End Visibility Across Hybrid Environments
As complexity and digital dependency accelerates, gaps in network and application visibility impede effective troubleshooting, prolong outages, and make it difficult to isolate issues across today’s highly distributed pharmaceutical ecosystem.
Rapid Detection of Anomalous Activity and Lateral Movement
Valuable data from intellectual property, clinical trial participants, and medical research makes pharmaceutical networks key targets for malware, cybersecurity threats, and DDoS attacks. It is crucial to close visibility gaps that leave them vulnerable to intrusions and data breaches.
Costly Data Silos and Fragmented Observability
Telemetry often sits with separate operations and security teams, slowing investigation and extending resolution times while increasing costs for full data retention while only providing observability in some network locations and for a subset of application services in use.
Poor User Experience Impacts Researchers, Trial Participants, and Others
Trial participants’ confidence and researchers’ productivity suffer when disruptions affect trial data access or AI drug development results. Timely, high-quality user experience across complex hybrid infrastructure communications path is needed for comprehensive observability.
Outcomes That Matter
The Importance of Observability When Getting Lifesaving Drugs to Patients
Reduce Costly Downtime to Pharmaceutical Networks and Applications
NETSCOUT supports over 1,000 applications, including CTMS, LIMs, and MES apps for clinical trials, lab information management, and manufacturing execution. This helps IT rapidly identify and resolve application issues ecosystem.
Protect Drug Development and Reduce Financial Damages from Cyber Incidents
Rapid detection and response across pharmaceutical environments from NETSCOUT reduces the risk of DDoS attacks, lateral movement, prevents operational disruption, exfiltration of confidential data, and minimizes financial impact and regulatory fines.
Improve User Experience and Speed Drugs to Market
Drug development, clinical trials, and manufacturing can be optimized with observability solutions to rapidly pinpoint issues impacting AI technologies, wearable technology apps, or automated robotics.
Avoid Costly Regulatory Fines and Reputational Damage Strengthen Identity and Access Protection
End-to-end observability that strengthens identity and access protection helps detect abnormal access patterns and credential misuse early to reduce risk to drug development process, reputation, and fines.
Protect and Extend the Value of Existing and Future Observability Investments
As pharmaceuticals implements AI, IoT, automation, and robotics, NETSCOUT future-proofs investments and optimizes ROI with network observability and security solutions that meet your needs today and in the future.
Use Cases
Observability and Cybersecurity Insights for Pharmaceutical Organizations
Pharmaceutical organizations using NETSCOUT improve operational resilience, reduce risk, and strengthen their digital initiatives.
What Our Customers Are Saying
"NETSCOUT saved so many man hours in troubleshooting. Helping get to root cause of issues much faster. Issues that took days to weeks to solve are now being solved in a fraction of that time."
– User in hospital & health care with more than 1,000 employees | Read Full Review
Resources
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
What pharmaceutical applications should be part of proactive observability processes?
Comprehensive monitoring and analysis, leveraging a network vantage point, provides critical insights into pharmaceutical application activity, service dependencies, and the underlying network, including connectivity and traffic paths that impact performance, latency, errors, packet loss and much more. This is critically important for applications used in every stage of the drug research, trial, and manufacturing processes, including Clinical Trial management Systems (CTMS), Electronic Medical / Health Records (EMR/EHR), telehealth services or UCaaS, remote patient monitoring (RPM), e-prescription) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) among others.
How Can NETSCOUT help with user experience and performance issues in pharmaceutical research offices and factories?
NETSCOUT supports observability in any remote location the pharmaceutical IT team needs to assure performance and security including research facilities, centralized clinical trial sites, distributed sales and support offices, as well as factories worldwide. NETSCOUT’s nGenius solutions for observability deliver proactive monitoring for synthetic testing and deep packet inspection for IT organizations to move beyond reactive troubleshooting into more predictive and preventative postures, which is critical to all steps in the R&D, drug trials, and production processes.
How does NETSCOUT performance analysis of pharmaceutical applications differ from competitors’ tools?
NETSCOUT’s patented ASI technology, or Smart Data, delivers IP intelligence and metadata derived from packets. It natively supports over a thousand applications “out of the box,” including pharmaceutical applications used throughout the drug development to clinical trials, and productions processes including EMR, telehealth, MES, as well as provides flexible configuration options to support custom applications. NETSCOUT is the only solution to provide such flexibility.
How does NETSCOUT support Zero Trust and security in all aspects of pharmaceutical operations?
Security and Zero Trust initiatives are powered by NETSCOUT’s Omnis Cybersecurity solutions, including Omnis Cyber Intelligence and Omnis CyberStream, which provide packet-level insights for validating network segmentation, monitoring policy enforcement, and investigating suspicious activity. It gives pharmaceutical organizations insights into real network behavior to identify lateral movement, exfiltration of confidential data, and control gaps across hybrid environments.
How does NETSCOUT protect the availability of pharmaceutical operations?
NETSCOUT’s Arbor DDoS protection solution provides pharmaceutical organizations with multilayer DDoS protection that stops attacks at the edge, scales in the cloud, and adapts in real time. By combining always-on, on-premises mitigation with cloud-scale capacity and AI-driven intelligence, NETSCOUT protects critical pharmaceutical application and network services from all attack types and sizes.
