How Kneat’s SaaS platform is empowering customers through COVID-19

COVID-19 has become a stark reminder of the threat pandemics pose to the continuity of critical industries and the vital role life sciences companies play  in the development of vaccines and continued supply of medicines.

Under CDER Industry Guidance, ‘Planning for the Effects of High Absenteeism to Ensure Availability of Medically Necessary Drug Products’ and as part of ‘ISO 22301:2019’, pharmaceutical manufacturers, their suppliers and contract development manufacturing organizations are required to ensure supply of medicines and final drug products is not disrupted (1).

Within these regulations all companies undertake Business Continuity Planning exercises, but few would have planned for a global pandemic such as that which we are currently living through. Businesses have been forced to rapidly adapt, with many looking towards SaaS to enable normal business operations to continue under conditions of remote-working and contamination control. In this article we will delve into some of the key benefits that Kneat’s SaaS solution is delivering to our customers in these unusual times.

Scaling to increased demand

During the initial stages of the Covid-19 crisis we assisted several customers experiencing challenges around the performance of their on-premise applications. In each case we worked with the customer to trace the issues’ origins, revealing ‘significant internal IT infrastructure loading, caused by the organization’s sudden transition to remote-working’.

By contrast, throughout the duration of the COVID-19 crisis, the Kneat SaaS platform has continued to operate without any performance impact – with some SaaS customers opting to scale up or transition to SaaS in response to the increased demand for remote validation.  Scale-ability is one of the key strengths for customers using Kneat’s SaaS platform, as–the Kneat Operations team is focused on ensuring the SaaS platform is operating optimally and that capacity is always available to scale to meet customer need, whenever its required.

With the rapid transition to remote-working, business’ information security policies are being re-evaluated. Businesses previously reluctant to SaaS solutions are reconsidering in light of the Business Continuity benefits offered by SaaS.”

External manpower

One essential benefit of SaaS solutions within the post-COVID business environment is that the provider is often solely responsible for product delivery. The rapid move to remote working has placed significant pressure on companies’ internal infrastructure performance, but it is also consuming IT teams’ time and resources, causing delays to critical planned IT activities, such as migrations and upgrades. Excellent business continuity planning has allowed Kneat to seamlessly transition our entire SaaS team to remote-working and ensure product delivery continues undisturbed, with new additions to our team to accommodate product delivery demands.

the rapid move to remote working…[is] also consuming IT teams’ time and resources, causing delays to critical planned IT activities.”

Faster innovation

Kneat’s SaaS platform enables users to gain access to the latest Kneat features more quickly and efficiently than in on-premise implementations. Upgrades to the Kneat SaaS platform do not require the engagement of stretched in-house IT resources and can be performed using Kneat’s innovative automation practices.  SaaS is also Kneat’s long-term preferred delivery model, as customers continue to grow usage of Kneat within their business and plan roll-outs to additional divisions across the globe. The FDA’s upcoming guidance around Computer System Assurance is also optimised towards the faster feature delivery enabled by Kneat’s SaaS solution.

Dedicated security

Kneat’s top priority is the security and integrity of customer data hosted on our SaaS platform. At Kneat we have extensive experience working with customer Information Security teams to successfully achieve approval to host customers on our SaaS platform. We have designed our solution from the ground-up to deliver a best-in-class security framework and are constantly evolving the solution to defend against emerging threats. With the rapid transition to working from home, many formerly core-principles of business’ information security policies are now being re-evaluated. Businesses that would have been reluctant to consider SaaS solutions, due to a preference from hosting applications on-site, are reviewing this policy in light of the Business Continuity benefits offered by embracing SaaS solutions.

About the Author

Sean Daffy is the SaaS Engineering Manager at Kneat. He possesses over 15 years’
experience in computer engineering and dev-ops, specializing in SaaS product delivery.

References

• ‘Planning for the Effects of High Absenteeism to Ensure Availability of Medically Necessary Drug Products’, US Food & Drug Administration, Center for Drug Evaluation and Reseach,[https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/planning-effects-high-absenteeism-ensure-availability-medically-necessary-drug-products-0]