CloudExplorer - An Audit Trail Product for Life Sciences Companies

Cloud storage of company data is pretty mainstream nowadays. Attend any online meeting and the discussion of Shop Floor or Cost Center data being extracted and moved to the cloud is an everyday occurrence.  Financial, Marketing, Production, Back Office, Logistics, Supply Chain, etc.  You name it, and the data related to those disciplines is most likely going to the cloud.

What To Do With All That Data in the Cloud?

Well, it is there for PhDs and their modeling software to make the best use of it to determine marketing trends, production and employee efficiencies, and even placed there for long term storage in the event of a product recall or if you are in a regulated industry, available to both internal and external auditors for review. 

How Do We Ensure Data Integrity?

What I described above is actually the easiest part of cloud storage.  Getting data there the first time.

Once data leaves the business or operations area and is moved to an Enterprise area like the cloud, companies have the added responsibility to make sure that any changes of data does indeed get changed in the cloud to ensure ‘data integrity’.

What is ‘data integrity’?  Trusting that the data created is true and legitimate at all times.  The data should be true and trusted no matter if it is being viewed from a Shop Floor system or from a repository sitting in the cloud.

Companies spend countless hours and thousands of dollars to ensure that this does indeed take place.  Changes of data at one level of the company get reflected at other levels of the company where the data may be stored or duplicated.  It is through a series of audit trails and ‘data chain-of-custodies’ that the data is guaranteed to be true and correct at all times.  Audit trails must be put in place to give assurance internally to the company and mostly the customers of the company.

How to Maintain Data Integrity

Here at Deadline Solutions, Inc. (DSI), we have created a system that lets companies attach to their data storage systems both locally and in the cloud, which in turn allows for them to view and modify the data. 

The key component of this system is that it creates a digital ledger entry into an immutable database that keeps track of:

• the data ‘change’
• the ‘date’ of the change
• ‘who’ made the change

An electronic bread crumb of the data change, thus ensuring data integrity.

Meet CloudExplorer

Building on the success of our eForms Electronic Logbook System, the next generation of software within our family of audit trail producing products is CloudExplorer.

With CloudExplorer, companies can now quickly view data in the Amazon S3 Buckets, Azure Blob Storage, or a database of their choosing.  Office and IT personnel can view the data in these not so friendly data storage environments with ease.  

Features of CloudExplorer are the following:

• Data Audit Trails for all data modifications
• System Audit Trails for any system configuration changes
• ‘Spreadsheet’ displays all data
• Security is provided at the application and domain level.  (i.e. Finance can only see Finance forms, Engineering can only see engineering data forms, etc.)
• Integrates easily to your company domain
• Install on premise or you guessed it ‘in the cloud’

Viewing and Modifying the data is just half the story.  If you so choose, advanced features like WebHooks can be used to interact with your company back-end processing system.  

Every customer has a unique and custom solution to handle their business needs.  We developed CloudExplorer with that in mind.  We give our customers a standard front-end to view their cloud data, and they decide how to process it.  CloudExplorer does the rest and you can be sure that the Data Audit Trail is there for you to have peace of mind.

Contact us here at DSI and let us know how we can help you.

Remember, your data has integrity! 

Let CloudExplorer help you to keep it that way!