Snowflake connected with Ashish Sharma from Novartis at Data Cloud Summit 2021 to hear how the pharmaceutical company is using data to uncover insights and make better forecasts.

The pharmaceutical industry is changing rapidly. It’s under more pressure than ever to leverage data to deliver better products, therapies, and products to patients, including vaccines developed on record timelines. This requires more secure, scalable, and flexible platforms that can centralize, unify, and share sensitive, governed, and regulated data. 

After spending 14 years in the data-intensive world of finance, Ashish Sharma joined Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis as its Executive Director of Data and Platforms, Commercial Effectiveness. He’s tasked with getting data into the company’s analysts’ hands faster and embedding it in everyday decision-making and operational activities across the business.

“The pharmaceutical industry is going all in on data, but it’s impossible to get there without massive compute and management capacities,” he said. 

Unifying Siloed Data in Near Real Time

The pharmaceutical industry is heavily focused on proven value, regulatory compliance, and delivering safe, effective products to customers and patients. Driving innovation forwards depends on reconciling complex data relationships between disparate, siloed sources such as de-identified patient records, clinical data pools, formularies, physician registries, and more. What’s clear is just how much data there is and how siloed it can be, making it critical to find ways to securely bring it all together.

The Snowflake Data Cloud empowers data-intensive enterprises such as Novartis to unify data from fragmented sources, seamlessly manage and deliver it in near real time, and do so while safeguarding sensitive information. 

“We have to unite all data from many silos to get the insights we need. It used to take three to six months before we could get meaningful insights from data. Snowflake is a game-changer. It transforms how we can manage, secure, and analyze data to make it truly useful across our organization.”

—Ashish Sharma, Executive Director of Data and Platforms, Commercial Effectiveness, Novartis 

For data to come together in a standardized format, organizations need to take a more data agnostic approach to dealing with it. They can’t afford to have to worry about whether it’s in Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or other environments. 

“I can’t run analytics if I have nine different platforms hosting nine data environments. With Snowflake I can bring all these data sets together in a powerful, compliant way that’s cloud-agnostic.”

—Ashish Sharma, Executive Director of Data and Platforms, Commercial Effectiveness at Novartis 

A Growing Ecosystem

Novartis uses the Snowflake Data Cloud to pull data from its internal silos and is evaluating approaches to data consolidation in an industry where fragmentation is still the norm. It’s one of the biggest challenges Novartis faces, but Sharma said that’s fortunately beginning to change.

“Things aren’t yet standardized and they’re not interoperable, but more organizations are now using Snowflake—and it’s creating a chain reaction. The ecosystem is growing, and we’re discovering news strategies to address data access and interoperability.”

—Ashish Sharma, Executive Director of Data and Platforms, Commercial Effectiveness, Novartis 

He hopes every organization in the pharmaceutical industry introduces Snowflake into its data infrastructure strategy. “It immediately will solve a lot of compute and interoperability issues,” he said. “The standardization will impact how we all benefit from data and make decision-making easier for everyone.”