Clinical Financial Services' disaster-recovery system does more than protect data and applications -- the system also helps the growing company convince Big Pharma customers that their data is safe.
Exactly how does a tiny firm convince giant pharmaceutical corporations to trust it with mission-critical financial information?
For Clinical Financial Services (CFS) the answer to that question was being able to show that it relied exclusively on "Big Boy Technology" -- including backup and disaster-recovery systems that would protect the customers' data no matter what. In this case, disaster recovery actually delivered value before disaster strikes.
CFS is a fast-growing but still small company that provides payment services for clinical trials run by multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical operations. Using a Web service, the pharmaceutical companies supply CFS with patient information, and the firm integrates it with SAP and makes associated payments to clinics in the United States and around the world.
IT's All Outsourced
And while the 25-person firm has doubled in size in the past 18 months, it still has no real IT department! It's all outsourced, says CFS VP of IT Glen Slater. "I manage an ecosystem. I manage my partners rather than employees." To make this "new way of working" successful, Slater says, "you have to have some good partners, and you have to know what you're doing."
Founded in 2001 to provide financial services to clinics, CFS in 2007 began offering services directly to the pharmaceutical industry. In addition to collecting data from clinical trial sites, the company began making payments as well.
To make it happen, CFS works with Miles Technologies, a New Jersey-based managed services provider, to host the SQL server-based transaction and payment application that integrates with SAP. The MSP provided first-layer backups at its facility, and CFS used EVault from i365 (a Seagate company) as a second-layer alternative.
But in late 2007 CFS decided that it needed additional backup systems to reassure potential clients of its ability to protect their data and restore full operations within 24 hours in the event of a disaster that prevented access to CFS headquarters.
"We knew we were going to go through a compliance audit," Slater says, because CFS's unique model of outsourcing business process optimization was "creating transactional data that doesn't exist today."
In the pharmaceutical industry, Slater explains, the clinical trial payment process was not very well integrated, often using standalone Microsoft Access databases and Excel spreadsheets. Selling a new solution required getting to the CIO level in large companies with a "tech-savvy approach that makes sense to an executive. We couldn't go in half-baked."
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