Why is this a big problem for the Life Sciences industry?
Instrument manufacturers are constantly evolving and improving the instruments they provide to pharmaceutical and research organisations, then decommissioning instruments that are “end of life” and no longer supported.
Continuing to use end of life systems is a highly risky strategy for any organisation, yet so many companies do it.
In this video, we explore some of the problems that the industry faces.
How end of life system scenarios might affect you
Here are a few scenarios where life sciences organisations need to consider the impact end of life systems have on their data
Isolated systems that are already end of life
When instruments are decommissioned by manufacturers, organisations often have to disconnect them from the rest of their network in an attempt to mitigate risk of data breach. However, the data on these systems are often isolated too, meaning that valuable data is for all intents and purposes, lost.
End of life and decommissioned systems
Continuing to use end of life systems is a highly risky strategy for any organisation, yet so many companies do it. As an example, the vulnerable Windows XP operating system is still running on 7% of the world’s computers. Pharmaceutical companies who are part of this statistic are at risk. Not only does this mean a severe lack of security as you are often unable to plug end of life systems into your security policies and processes, it also means a lot of your valuable data is locked in to a system that could die at any point. Even if you have a Scientific Data Management System (SDMS) to deal with the data generated by these instruments today they rarely deal with historic or legacy data which puts a lot of your research data at risk of loss or corruption.
Systems reaching end of life
You may have had a notification from your instrument manufacturer detailing a date by which they are planning to cease support on their research system, research organisations are challenged with preserving the data which is created by these instruments for future scientific use.
The challenge facing Pharma and research organisations
Can you still access your valuable data?
The Life Sciences industry and science in general has always been a large data producer – how do you ensure that you can access and use all of this valuable data if the instruments you use to collect such data are no longer supported by the instrument manufacturer? In this video we describe some of the challenges in the industry.
