Quanticate, a leading, global, data-focused Clinical Research Organisation (CRO), has deployed Commvault software to ensure sustained confidentiality, integrity, availability and compliance with global legislation for all their electronic data assets. The deployment of the Commvault solution enables Quanticate’s continued commitment to the highest calibre of data security and integrity when managing clinical trial data for the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. With a single platform, more efficient back up, recovery and archiving has been achieved as well as functionality to prepare for a cloud-based business continuity strategy to be developed in the future.
As a global CRO, Quanticate enables major pharmaceutical companies to take their products to market. It manages the lifecycle of its customers’ clinical trial data, from initial trial design and data collection, through to the final delivery to the pharmaceutical sponsor ready for submission to regulators. As the pharmaceutical sector is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world, Quanticate needs to ensure complete data integrity throughout its period of custody as well as retaining all study data in an accessible form for a minimum of 15 years after a trial ends.
Prior to the Commvault implementation Quanticate faced excessive backup windows and a fragmented recovery processes, causing complexity and time costs. Combined with rapid data growth, Quanticate elected to review its data management strategy before it impeded the business’ potential to expand. Commvault software’s source-side deduplication capabilities significantly reduce bandwidth needs during backup or recovery, making data transfer much more cost efficient and reducing average back up times by approximately 75%. It also negated the need for couriers to transfer off-site backups between primary and DR sites, substantially reducing recovery time objectives (RTOs).
“Ensuring the integrity and management of our customers’ data is one of the key elements that differentiates our business as a data-focused CRO and ensures we can provide the highest quality of service.” said James Mackellar, CIO at Quanticate, “The combined de-duplication, compression, archiving and accessibility capability that Commvault provided us meant that from a business perspective we can prove our compliance quicker, with greater visibility for our clients and hence do more business. Information security and compliance is imperative to our clients’ success as well as our own. Our data management strategy reflects our commitment in this area supported by a complete ISO 27001 compliant Information Security Management System (ISMS)”.
In the short-term future, Quanticate also plans to take further advantage of the opportunities that cloud has to offer – especially the potential for hybrid data centre and private cloud strategies - with parts of their infrastructure being on premise while other virtual machines reside elsewhere. By being able to seamlessly migrate data and virtual machines without compromising security or data backup, it is possible to develop dynamic capacity planning with confidence. Commvault also enables the use of secure, encrypted cloud storage locations for long-term data retention rather than having to invest in an ever-growing storage network. Further resilience is possible by using multiple cloud providers in the future.
“Being able to rehearse disaster recovery in the cloud for example, could provide considerable cost savings,” said Mackellar. “Whilst we are still in the exploratory phase with regards to this use case for cloud services, it is reassuring that our Commvault solution can facilitate this and significantly reduce our sunk costs in idle hardware.”
“The Commvault solutions portfolio has been designed to not only protect data, but to transform businesses with intelligent data management and increased efficiency, and Quanticate is another example of a major global Healthcare industry organisation that we can deliver these benefits to,” said Bruce Park, Area Vice President UK & Ireland, Commvault. “The solution provides a truly holistic approach to protecting, managing and accessing data making it the perfect fit for Quanticate’s
