9 Reasons Why You Should Choose Cloud-Based Validation

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Kneat Gx, our innovative software-as-a-service (SaaS) digital validation solution, resides in a secure cloud environment that leverages automation for rapid implementation, resulting in reduced time to benefit, lower costs, scalability, and ease of use for our customers.

Deciding whether to store your organization’s validation information and activities on-premises or in the cloud, or migrating it from one to the other, can sometimes appear complex. However, the many significant advantages that an automated cloud environment offers today have led to more and more validation and quality professionals choosing a cloud provider, and a 10% reduction in the number of on-premises workloads reported in 2020 (1).

In this article, we examine the perceived issues of cost, maintenance, security, compliance, scalability, reliability, and integration that can persist when discussing the cloud. And we look at some of the advantages of using cloud-based SaaS, over an on-premises model for validation processes.

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1. Cost and Maintenance

One key benefit that a cloud-based solution delivers is the reduction of costs. Oftentimes the hardware and software license costs are low when compared to the traditional on-premises model. Maintenance, software updates, security, and customer support are all the remit of the cloud provider—meaning that you don’t have to spend time troubleshooting any issues. Lower costs also afford better accessibility for organizations with lean validation teams and smaller budgets.

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2. Security

Security issues can often be one of the biggest perceived barriers to transitioning from an on-premises to a cloud solution. Today, the state of cloud security has never been better, with cloud service workloads experiencing 60% fewer security incidents than those in traditional data centers (2).

Kneat offers comprehensive, multi-layered security that is backed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) (3) and includes the following services and benefits:

• ‘AWS WAF’ web application firewall
• ‘AWS Security Groups’ interface firewalls
• ‘Outscan Scanning’ continuous vulnerability scanning
• ‘DarkTrace’ and ‘Guard Duty’ continuous threat detection
• ‘DarkTrace Anigena’ threat prevention
• ‘AWS Shield’ DDoS Protection
• Ongoing backups and patching
• Full disaster recovery

Kneat’s robust SaaS infrastructure undergoes annual independent penetration tests, in addition to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) own independent tests, periodic internal tests, and 24/7 security monitoring.

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3. Compliance

Organizations in highly regulated industries, such as life sciences, are subject to strict regulatory compliance requirements. Using a cloud provider, like Kneat, which is Part 11/Annex 11 compliant can help to ease the burden of compliance. Kneat is compliant to the world’s leading quality standards. Each of our certifications are tied to leading global quality standards and are accredited to us by reputable independent authorities following rigorous audit. We are committed to ensuring full transparency of the standards of our work.

Learn more about our extensive compliance standards

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4. Scalability

Cloud storage is scalable with unlimited server capacity, with no capital investment required.  As such, organizations can scale validation activities as required, quickly and easily, using features that are built in. This flexibility removes the necessity to monitor and scale your processes manually and can help to reduce your overhead.

5. Reliability

If you have a strong, reliable Internet connection you can easily access a cloud solution, from anywhere in the world. If you are concerned about the reliability of your Internet connection. consider adding a back-up connection to avoid any break in productivity caused by issues.

6. Integration

Using a scalable, cloud-based SaaS solution allows easy integration with other SaaS products. You simply enable your new SaaS product, and it is absorbed by your cloud solution provider’s existing server capacity.

Kneat is a cloud-native solution and now includes the use of API services and micro-services, enabling Kneat to fit within your own IT ecosystem. Kneat Gx integrates by sending and receiving notifications, data, and services, via a customer’s or Kneat Partner’s integration layer into their IT ecosystem and back, serving a wide range of use cases—such as publishing to their ecosystem and automated user setup.

How Kneat Enables Automated Setup—Example Use Case

Other recent software developments at Kneat include:

• oAuth—this enables secure delegated access to Kneat. oAuth lets a customer or Partner application access Kneat. This kind of access requires Tokens (4), which represent delegated right of access.
• OpenAPIs—an open API is an application programming interface made publicly available to software developers. It provides standards for how software programs communicate with each other. Open APIs enable our customer and Kneat Partner developers, because they now need to write less code to make different software programs work together with Kneat seamlessly.

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7. Rapid implementation

SaaS differs from an on-premises model because with SaaS, the software application is already installed and configured. At Kneat our cloud engineers simply provision our server for a new instance in cloud, and in a short period of time, the Kneat Gx application is ready for use by our customers.

Kneat’s use of cloud automation tools

Our engineering team use specialized cloud automation tools to speed up the implementation, deployment, and qualification of Kneat for our customers.

Using these tools, our cloud engineering team builds one version of a product. Then they qualify it, test it, and make sure that everything works as it should. Next, they build the tooling that allows them to build that version multiple times over. And because the team are using infrastructure-as-code best-practices for their deployments—in place of manual interventions—they know that they are deploying the same thing over and over. All this means that Kneat can deploy and qualify a customer environment faster than ever before. Other customer benefits of using cloud automation tools include quick and easy customization, increased control and flexibility, and scale out capabilities.

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8. Seamless updates

Any new releases or upgrades are available for our customers at no extra cost—unlike with a traditional on-premises model, there is no need to buy and install an upgrade package or pay for specialized upgrade services. Kneat’s Customer Success team informs our customers in regular business meetings of any upcoming releases and works closely with them to ensure a seamless experience.

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9. Ease of use

Kneat was built by validation professionals, for validation professionals. As such, our platform’s intuitive interface is easy to navigate and comes with baked-in best practices, and validation protocol samples. Kneat is easy to use—but don’t just take our word for it, here’s what two of our customers had to say!

“User friendliness was also key to us – the actual number of clicks it takes to get the job done…You can get people up to speed quicker, they don’t have to worry about where the latest template was. We surveyed ten other vendors and were looking for not only a solution that could perform the tasks, but which solution was easiest to use. Deploying into all of our plants, that buy-in was very important, and we knew ease-of-use would be key to getting that buy-in.”

— Global Biotech Director, Global Systems and Standards

“We did a lot of vendor homework before we started the relationship with Kneat. What really was the winning factor with Kneat, is ease of use and the seamlessness of use. I think users felt that Kneat was really, much more intuitive. We are also trying to look forward, to future users of the system – who will want to work with something that looks and feels modern and Kneat provided us with this in addition to all of the great capabilities.”

— Inna Ben-Anat, Global Executive Director, QMS Technology Transfer & Commercialization, Merck Sharp Dohme (MSD)

Kneat’s Process Engineering team works with our customers at the implementation stage, to help configure and map their processes into Kneat, for deployment. And our team of Kneat Academy instructors are there to support Kneat Gx software training programs that have been designed to produce real-world digital validation deliverables, accounting for all levels of competency.

 

Leading companies choose cloud based validation

Minimal capital expenditure, rapid implementation and time to benefit, extensive security and recovery, and unlimited scalability make cloud-based SaaS cheaper, safer, and smarter. And there’s no hardware procurement required—just deploy, configure, and use Kneat securely online, anywhere with an internet connection.

Today, more than 17,000 validation, compliance, and quality professionals within highly regulated businesses—including eight of the world’s top ten pharmaceutical companies—use Kneat to manage, execute, and archive their validation documentation, securely, rapidly, and cost-effectively in the cloud.

Read more about MSD’s story and why they chose Kneat, our cloud-based paperless validation solution, here.

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References

1. Cloud Vision 2020: The Future of Cloud Study, [https://www.logicmonitor.com/resource/the-future-of-the-cloud-a-cloud-influencers-survey].
2. Cloud Study Strategy Leadership: Gartner Insights on How and Why Leaders Must Implement Cloud Computing, [https://www.gartner.com/imagesrv/books/cloud/cloud_strategy_leadership.pdf].
3. Amazon Web Services (AWS), [https://aws.amazon.com/].
4. OAuth Access Tokens, [https://oauth.net/2/access-tokens/#:~:text=An%20OAuth%20Access%20Token%20is,formats%20for%20their%20access%20tokens].