The pharmaceutical industry is on the verge of a critical turning point: as serialization introduces massive amounts of data into the supply chain, the industry must abandon traditional technologies that were simply not designed for a challenge of these dimensions. Companies who continue to rely on traditional solutions—most notably, relational database management systems (RDBMS)—will unequivocally fail, jeopardizing their ability to move product through the supply chain, their revenue, and their brand reputation. 

With serialization, data volumes will increase by multiple orders of magnitude—100 to 100,000 times larger—posing an “internet-scale” problem. Solutions based on traditional application architectures, for enterprise-class problems involving many fewer transactions, will not be able to scale to meet the demands. The combination of a massive database, high transaction volume, and the time required for operational processes demands a paradigm shift in technology.

In this whitepaper, we will review the depth of the challenge that serialization introduces, where relational databases can contribute, and where they cannot, and how a move to NoSQL—a database technology relied on by other industries to solve internet class problems—in a native-cloud architecture is ultimately what’s required to maximize performance and enable the pharma industry to successfully meet the serialization challenge.