While the digital ecoystem is still a new frontier for some pharmaceutical companies, many are beginning to modernize through a digital transformation strategy. Digital transformation refers to the adoption of digital processes and tools to achieve strategic business goals and can include initiatives like:
Personalizing customer engagement
Reducing technology costs
Maintaining regulatory compliance
Improving employee productivity and operational efficiency
Enhancing internal decision making
In this post, we'll look at how the Veeva platform can enable pharmaceutical companies' digital transformation and how they can maintain business continuity throughout the process.
Pharmaceutical companies are transforming on the Veeva platform. With Veeva, pharma companies can easily maintain strong relationships with healthcare professionals and consumers on one central platform. Pharma companies can leverage Veeva to unify messaging across marketing and sales channels and measure and improve processes across the whole company, including manufacturing.
Integrations and business applications are some of the most effective tools for incorporating, analyzing, and coordinating customer data, which makes them absolutely vital for pharma organizations embracing digital transformation. Some of the applications will need to be custom designed to meet the data needs of your specific business. Other business applications, some of which are available from Veeva partners, include solutions for marketing automation, CPQ, finance management, and sales process optimization.
Since many pharma companies often have multiple legacy systems and processes, a successful move to digital will require an IT infrastructure transformation. While developing your transformation plan, don’t assume that your data is completely backed up in the cloud. Even when innovating on a SaaS application, like Veeva, you’re responsible for protecting your data from user-inflicted data loss and corruption, which can be caused by human error, integration errors, buggy code, and malicious intent. A comprehensive backup and recovery strategy will not only accelerate your digital transformation by avoiding unexpected data loss and corruption detours, it will also minimize some of the non-compliance risks an accidental data loss during these projects could incur.
Veeva is built on top of Salesforce, which means recovering lost or corrupted Veeva data could be challenging, depending on the stage of deletion. According to Veeva support, there are three stages of data recovery:
If the data is no longer in the recycle bin, you have to find and restore it using Salesforce Workbench
If the data is not available in either of the first two, then it has been permanently deleted and must be recovered through Salesforce Data Recovery Service for a fee and takes time
That final option, however, won't be an option for much longer. Salesforce announced that they will be retiring their last-resort data recovery service, effective July 31, 2020 because it has not met their high standards of customer success and trust. For customers who aren’t proactively backing up their data, Salesforce currently offers this last resort Data Recovery service. However, at a cost of over $10,000 and a 6-8 week recovery time this service is not an adequate option for many customers. The upcoming retiring of this last resort Data Recovery service is an excellent opportunity to remember that a proactive backup and recovery has always been a required and recommended best practice.
The risk and costs of accidental data loss can multiply the longer your Veeva data is inaccessible. What the recovery time and recovery point end up being are deeply influenced by backup frequency, backup retention, your ability to compare current and past data, and to restore just the data that has been impacted. RTO and RPO are two parameters that help minimize the risks associated with user-inflicted data loss.
If you’re not backing up your Veeva data, you will experience a six-week RPO and five-week RTO. If you’re backing up with the Salesforce Weekly Export, you will experience a one week RPO and five week RTO. Could you imagine data being unavailable for one to five weeks? Whenever your data is unavailable to your employees, integrations, or applications, numerous departments of your business, and your digital transformation initiatives could grind to a halt, which could cause you to lose customers, revenue, and more. Your organization needs to be able to recover as quickly as possible to maintain business continuity.
Business risk is high during these transformative initiatives, which means it’s critical to have a data, metadata, and attachment backup and recovery strategy in place beforehand.
