Exostar’s Life Sciences Identity Hub, a cloud-based, connect-once solution delivered as-a-Service is increasing collaboration with other partners to deliver value to pharmaceutical companies as it reaches new milestones. Vijay Takanti, Vice President of Security and Collaboration Solutions, Exostar, shares more in an interview with Shalini Gupta
What market position do you enjoy in the cloud based solutions for life sciences sector?
We believe we have a leading market position for cloud-based solutions in the life sciences.
Not only were we on the scene over three years ago as industry organisations were just starting to seriously consider the cloud, but we bring extensive relevant cloud experience to the table. We have offered cloud-based solutions since we were formed in 2000, before the cloud was cool. These solutions served the aerospace and defense markets, which are similar to life science in terms of ‘co-opetition,’ compliance requirements, and the need to protect intellectual property and highly-sensitive information. Our aerospace and defense community includes over 100,000 organisations and nearly 400,000 individuals in 150 countries on all seven continents. We know what it takes to get the job done.
Why did you decide to expand into the medical devices, healthcare sector?
We have moved into healthcare and now medical devices because they are adjacent industries with similar security, collaboration, and compliance needs. The demand for solutions like ours is strong and the pain organisations and individuals are suffering is acute. We think our relevant bonafides and success position us to alleviate the pain and take advantage of the market opportunity.
What services did you start with? What services do you offer currently? What prompted you to add more services under the umbrella?
The engine behind the Life Sciences Identity Hub is our Secure Access Manager (SAM). SAM enforces the policies, procedures, and permissions that connected organisations assign to the assets they own. These organisations connect once to the Identity Hub, which lets them make their applications, portals, and other assets available to external partners and their employees. Through delegated administration, asset owners assign the privileges, so they retain control. SAM authenticates individuals who present credentials for access, and enables access per the assigned rules.
We also are an Identity Provider, so we can issue credentials to individuals for authentication, or we can accept credentials issued either by an asset owner or a trusted third-party. Organisations can accept our credentials with confidence, because the SAFE – BioPharma Association has named us a fully-certified Credential Service Provider.
Initially, we added value to the community by connecting our SharePoint-based multi-tenant collaboration solution, Secure Share, to the Life Sciences Identity Hub. With Secure Share, organisations can create dynamic team sites that cross corporate boundaries, control access with multiple levels of security, and exchange documents and data through encryption at-rest and in-transit. To enhance the utility of our cloud-based community, we have continued to add third-party applications, which led to the partner programme launch. The interest from connected organisations and solution providers to participate is fuelling the service expansion.
How are cloud based solutions for life sciences industry different from those for other industries? What details need to be kept in mind while designing these solutions?
These days, businesses in all industries have made cyber security a top priority. Above and beyond corporate policies, the life science and healthcare industries must account for regulations defined by Government agencies like the FDA and DEA in the US. The need for protection must be balanced against the need to work with external parties. So, while the public cloud may be an option for some vertical markets, it is too open for life science and healthcare. Conversely, a private cloud delivers on security, but it can’t keep up with the continued migration to the external partner model companies in life science and healthcare are adopting.
That’s why we chose to deliver our solution with a hybrid cloud. It combines the openness of the public cloud with the security of the private cloud. By offering multiple levels of access with different strengths of credentials, we provide the upgraded security and compliance life science and healthcare organisations demand.
What is the USP of the Lifesciences Identity Hub?
When companies try to implement a solution on their own, they end up creating a series of point-to-point relationships and connections that are redundant and don’t scale. With the Exostar Life Sciences Identity Hub, organisations connect once and have pathways to all other connected organisations. On-boarding and provisioning times have proven to drop from weeks or months to days. Individuals enjoy a single sign-on user experience that allows them to get to work faster, without encumbering them with multiple credentials that raise the security risk. Keeping track of individual participants, their permissions, and their credential requirements is an onerous task for life science and healthcare companies. So is conducting the identity proofing process prior to issuing a credential to an individual. We take care of all of those activities, along with on-boarding and customer support, through our as-a-service delivery model.
An unexpected area of growth for the company is…
One area where we are seeing increasing interest is in electronic prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS). To keep powerful narcotics from falling into the wrong hands or being abused, here in the US, the DEA has instituted strict regulations. Healthcare providers today are writing and filling prescriptions through a paper-based, manual process that is costly and time consuming. By taking advantage of Exostar’s identity proofing and issuance/ authentication of strong credentials, health IT vendors are able to augment their solutions to include EPCS capabilities. With EPCS, providers can spend more time with patients and less on paperwork, prescriptions are more secure, and the entire process is captured for audit and proof of compliance. This is an exciting application that is bringing more healthcare vendors and providers into our community every day.
Tell us something about your new partner programme. How many MNC pharma firms are a part of it and how many are yet to sign up?
We formally launched our partner programme this year to enhance the value of belonging to our life science and healthcare community and to respond to the demand from technology, application, and reseller solution vendors to join the community. The MNC pharma firms aren’t part of the partner programme per se; they are the organisations and users of the solution we offer. Seven of the ten largest firms have connected to the Life Sciences Identity Hub to date, with two of them using it as their dedicated global R&D platform.
TransCelerate, the consortium of 19 global pharma leaders, is also connecting to our Identity Hub so their members get the security and access assurance they demand as they look to define standard processes and procedures that will streamline industry operations.
Enumerate your goals and plans for the coming few years. What solutions do you aim to offer to healthcare providers and medical device companies?
Our primary goal looking forward is to continue to deliver a valuable service to our customers in life science, healthcare, medical devices, and beyond. We want to be the go-to solution for organisations and individuals to securely, productively, and cost-effectively conduct business with one another – whether that business is new drug R&D; delivery of healthcare involving patients, providers, and payers; enabling collaboration across the supply chain, or emerging technologies and opportunities.
In other words, we have to deliver a solution that is scalable; performs impeccably; supports wireless, social, and the Internet of Everything; and provides an unparalleled user experience that gives individuals precisely what they want and need. That means connecting more organisations, identity providers, and applications to the Life Sciences Identity Hub.
At this time, we feel we have barely scratched the surface in the life science, healthcare, and medical device sectors. All have tremendous potential for growth, so we expect to expand horizontally, vertically, and geographically. It’s simply too soon to know which will grow fastest, but the key is that we have a cloud-based solution with proven scalability and a dedicated team that understands we have to be flexible as markets, technologies, and business models evolve.
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