Shoring up Your IT SOPs to Stay Compliant

Standard operating procedures are a must in regulated industries. These procedures help your business stay compliant with laws and regulations and give your employees guidance on what to do when changes happen or when a disaster occurs.

Slipstream’s Quality and Compliance team has a standard set of IT SOPs for emerging Pharma and Biotech organizations. It helps companies just breaking into the industry start on the right foot and helps established companies know what they might be missing. Some SOPs we offer include:

Physical Security SOPs

Many companies have their security systems connected to networks, and a basic premise of IT security is locking down physical systems. Maintaining keycards, access codes, the alarm system, and even environmental controls are all part of physical security.

Logical Security SOPs

R&D companies are among the top targets of hackers. Logical security SOPs guard your systems against external threats and theft of your data. Logical security covers things like firewalls, virus protection, VPNs, password policies, and other software-related cybersecurity matters.

System Change Control SOPs

A change in your systems can have cascading effects that damage your company’s ability to operate. Any change to your IT must be documented and have an impact assessment. You might need validation assessments to confirm the change will not affect business operations. There should also be a way to roll back the change.

All of this also needs to be reviewed and approved by stakeholders. System change control is one of the hardest things to get right because it’s so easy to make changes and mistakes.

Configuration Management SOPs

Configuration management is the flip-side of system change control. It involves the documentation of your IT configuration. This creates a baseline to go back to if a problem happens during a change. There also needs to be procedures to verify that your system configuration matches the documentation, as well as version control and maintenance to upgrade the standards.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for SOPs. Disaster recovery, system maintenance, backup and restoration procedures, and more are all necessary to meet regulatory requirements. Slipstream offers “IT SOPs in-a-box” to our clients, giving them a turnkey solution for SOP creation.

We want all our clients to get access to industry experts and leverage best practices in IT to help them innovate the treatments of tomorrow. Creating better IT SOPs is just part of that. For a full rundown of our Quality and Compliance services, contact us to learn what we can do for you.