Prescribing DevOps to Healthcare and Pharma
The adoption of DevOps in life sciences, healthcare and pharma is driven by nothing more than some simple common sense. According to the analyst group Forrester Research, some key objectives as to why the pharma industry is ranked as one of the top industry in adopting DevOps is because of the following:
- Generating faster Revenue:
Getting to the market quickly with a compelling motivator and clearly demonstrates effective ROI.
- Fewer problems with releases
A few of the reported benefits of DevOps adopters are better product quality, lower failure rates and quicker lead time between fixes.
- Greater efficiency in the development process
As well as better overall productivity brought about by increased use of automated processes, DevOps enables better dynamic scaling of IT ops resource to meet development needs and address ‘feast or famine’ usage without over or under compensating. This alleviates resource bottlenecks and prevents overspends on unused capacity.
A biotech firm, MediVector, which uses DevOps tools such as Salt to deploy and freeze virtual machine images used in the drug development process” as part of a broader Agile approach said in an interview with a tech magazine that the status of each virtual machine can be easily audited by the QA team which saves them valuable time in the development process.
A set of key differences between the traditional IT systems and DevOps for the healthcare and pharma industry
- Rigidity vs Flexibility
The traditional IT solutions used in the healthcare business have a very rigid life cycle from the development of the software, testing, Q & A, delivery and finally feedback. DevOps in healthcare focuses keenly on the value of development and delivery for value creation and risk mitigation.
- Macro vs Micro
Traditional healthcare software solutions focused on a big project release that involves high costs and occurs infrequently. In contrast, DevOps and healthcare adopt a micro approach, avoiding complex releases and mitigating risks for gradual advancement at regular intervals with lower risks.
- Data Monitoring vs Data Sharing
Traditional healthcare IT solutions have a cumbersome data sharing process due to management approvals and lengthy reports. DevOps and healthcare solutions have a dedicated data sharing team to reduce management time wastage and provides relevant data to the specific team.
The barriers to adoption still remain. Something that the most advanced adopters of DevOps have in common is their young age as organizations. Notable examples include Facebook, Google and Airbnb. This not only provides a clean sheet of paper from an infrastructure perspective but also culturally as there is no legacy of traditional IT approaches to evolve. Clearly, while there are many ‘newborn’ exceptions, the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors have more than their fair share of long-established institutions. The good news is that even old-stagers like Johnson & Johnson are getting in on the act.
RightScale’s fifth annual State of the Cloud Survey found that almost three-quarters of organizations are deploying DevOps. However, industries such as healthcare have lagged a little behind the pack, owing to concerns about stability, security and loss of control.
DevOps is here to stay, and those yet to immerse themselves in tools like Docker, Puppet and Chef are fast becoming the minority. Extending present approaches to Agile and continuous delivery may not be a straightforward process, but it will be critical to enabling new advantages like increased automation and cloud orchestration.
For healthcare, life sciences and pharma organizations, software development is a global consideration that must achieve results in a highly competitive and regulated environment. DevOps is set to make lives a little easier, and software a little better, if it hasn’t already.