By Josh Davis, Account Director, Pharmaceutical Sector
As the Pharmaceutical industry continues to adopt cloud-first strategies, one issue keeps surfacing – the network doesn’t keep up.
What’s going wrong?
SD-WAN networks have helped with flexibility and cost, but they weren’t designed for the demands of pharmaceutical sensitive workloads. Clinical trial data, AI-driven research models, and manufacturing control systems all need consistent performance, compliance guarantees, and airtight security and resilience. The public Internet just wasn’t built for that!
How is this being addressed?
This year, I’m seeing more companies pairing their cloud strategy with a private, high-performance backbone network. In this space, service guarantees aren’t a nice-to-have, they’re a necessity.
Colman Deegan, our CEO at Zayo Europe, recently visited one of our pharmaceutical customers’ packaging plants with me, and Colman rightly pointed out;
“The need for robust, secure connectivity couldn’t be clearer. Our customer’s production line is fully automated – from robotic arms using Wi-Fi sensors to real-time barcode generation in the cloud for regulatory compliance. With the millions of doses they’re processing every day, even a brief network disruption could halt packaging entirely. That doesn’t just impact revenue but delays life-saving medications from reaching patients!”
So what?
In environments like this, poor-performing connectivity means daily, weekly, and monthly KPIs are missed, and the operational ripple effects can be massive. This is why reliable, high-performance infrastructure isn’t optional for a pharmaceutical company – it’s foundational.
What’s a popular solution?
One approach that’s quickly gaining popularity is deploying Regional Edge Points of Presence (Edge POPs) in major carrier-neutral facilities around the world. These compact, strategic hubs interconnect cloud environments, data partners, and enterprise sites over a private backbone, bypassing the public internet to significantly boost performance and security. These Edge POPs act as the gateway to multiple networks, cloud on-ramps, and peering exchanges.
The go-to model
With many pharmaceutical organisations’ aggressive growth objectives, increasingly distributed operations, multi-cloud platforms, and highly sensitive data that must move securely and reliably across global regions, Edge POPs provide a scalable and resilient way to manage traffic flows, reduce latency, and maintain strict compliance standards in a cloud-first world. For pharmaceutical organisations, this architecture is becoming less of an exception and more of a go-to model.
Highly Sensitive Data
A critical factor for pharmaceutical organisations is the ability to move sensitive data between global regions securely, efficiently, and cost-effectively. Relying solely on public cloud providers’ WAN offerings that operate over shared infrastructure and use dynamic, usage-based pricing models, can become difficult to control. As more clinical trial data, research outputs, and real-time manufacturing insights are exchanged across regions, these costs can escalate quickly and unpredictably.
In contrast, a private backbone network provides pharmacuetical organisations greater control, predictability, and security – ensuring seamless ‘follow-the-sun’ collaboration and help to keep cloud costs in check as data volumes grow.
Multi-Cloud platforms
What’s also clear is that pharmaceuticals cloud-first strategy isn’t a single-cloud strategy. Multi-cloud is here, whether it’s AWS for data lakes, Azure for collaboration, or GCP for AI/ML workloads. Leveraging this Edge POP architecture simplifies this complexity by providing a centralised connection across multiple cloud providers, and using a private backbone ensures an SLA-backed, secure path between them, keeping your infrastructure streamlined and protected.
Connecting Distributed Operations
Pharmaceutical companies don’t just operate in the cloud, they operate in the real world. R&D hubs, manufacturing plants, and logistics centres generate massive data that needs to move in real time to clouds, partners, and internal systems across the globe.
Edge POPs let you connect physical sites with high-performance, secure private links. This reduces latency, improves uptime, and ensures critical data flows without bottlenecks, keeping your operations running, and decisions moving at speed.
Built for Growth
M&A activity is picking up across the pharmaceutical industry. A global private backbone with Edge POPs lets organisations integrate new IT environments rapidly and securely. No waiting on public circuits. No worrying about unpredictable performance. Just fast, scalable connectivity that flexes with your business.
Real-World Use Case: Unified Global Backbone
One global pharmaceutical customer partnered with Zayo Europe to modernise their network infrastructure in line with their cloud-first, data-driven growth strategy. Their requirements were clear:
- Deterministic latency to key cloud on-ramps for AI research workloads
- Guaranteed path diversity into all critical R&D and manufacturing facilities and regional Cloud Edge Facilities
- Support for high-bandwidth services: including point-to-point connections, Direct Internet access, and secure WAN across single high bandwidth links
- Global connectivity between sites in Europe and North America with unified traffic flow control to protect sensitive IP
- Predictable cost model vs the dynamic pricing of public cloud WAN services
We deployed a tailored global solution with multiple R&D facilities & Edge POPs directly connected to the major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP. This architecture gave the customer an SLA-backed, secure, and scalable backbone to move large research datasets, connect new facilities quickly post-M&A, and accelerate their digital transformation without compromise.
The outcome has been so successful in standardising operations and securing cloud access across North America and Europe that the customer is now planning to extend this model into APAC with Zayo – creating a truly unified, global backbone architecture that supports consistent performance, control, and compliance across all regions.
Zayo Europe delivers the high-performance, secure network backbone Pharmacueticals need to connect R&D, manufacturing, and clouds on global scale. Purpose-built for low latency, scalability, and flexibility, our infrastructure ensures your network keeps pace with further digital transformation, changing demand sets and business growth objectives —so innovation is never held back by connectivity.
If you’re facing similar challenges or just curious about how other pharmaceutical organisations are tackling this, contact me to discuss the latest trends and solutions.