From supply chains to the mobile workforce to technology transfer, the pharma industry is figuring out where it makes the most business and operational sense to leverage cloud technologies. Many production systems today can be implemented in the cloud, but there are still very good reasons for keeping some of them on-premise for the foreseeable future.
As organizations consider which systems to move to the cloud and which to keep on-prem, they must consider how to protect both data and process control, while still making it easy to get critical data out of the system to enable enterprise-wide business decisions. Network latency, security and the role of individual systems in business processes should guide any strategy.
A new approach
For years, the Purdue Model — an industrial control systems architecture reference model — has been the gold standard for separating enterprise and control system functions into hierarchical zones for improved security and performance. More recently, however, the rapid expansion of IoT devices, along with edge and cloud technologies, has disrupted this hierarchical structure of data flow.
