TraceLink has introduced an early access program for a European Union (EU) hosted Life Sciences Cloud, which will be available to select customers and trading partners by February 2017.

With data residency in both the EU and U.S., global customers can utilize TraceLink’s network-tenant platform approach to reduce the time, cost and risk of achieving regulatory compliance for global requirements, including the EU Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD), and eliminate the need to verify and certify point-to-point connections to each government system.

As the industry prepares for the impending 2019 deadline for the EU FMD, the need for greater vigilance around drug product security in the EU has become increasingly crucial in light of recent drug counterfeiting incidents. In Europe, counterfeit medicine accounts for an estimated industry loss of approximately €10 billion in annual revenues and direct employment losses of approximately 38,000 jobs, according to a recent industry report.

“We’ve rapidly expanded our global footprint due to the industry’s need for a proven solution, and remain dedicated to helping our customers around the world meet their compliance, trade and corporate obligations,” said Shabbir Dahod, president and chief executive officer, TraceLink. “With this commitment and investment in Europe, TraceLink will be able to address our customer and partners’ requirements for data security, scalability, control and compliance, as the European market prepares for massive network and data challenges in order to meet serialization regulations.”

European data residency for the Life Sciences Cloud will be hosted by Amazon Web Services and deployed in Germany across multiple availability zones designed to automatically route serialized data feeds to the appropriate global region.