Pharmaceutical companies face enormous pressure to cut costs due to mandates from the government around America’s soaring healthcare costs and patent expirations. But, Dave Smoley, CIO of AstraZeneca plc, keeps his eyes on the prize.

“There are a lot of big data and analytic problems on the science side,” he said during an interview with theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at ServiceNow’s Knowledge15 event in Las Vegas. “On the other end of the spectrum, we have 30,000 sales folks around the world. We have to keep them mobile-enabled and give them the tools that they need.”

Streamlining costs and efficiencies in IT

AstraZeneca, which brings in $26 billion in sales and spends $5 billion a year on research, saw a huge opportunity to streamline costs and efficiency in its IT department. “We were 70 percent outsourced to third parties,” Smoley said. “We’re focusing on bringing that work in house and simplifying the process.”

AstraZeneca is also moving well into the cloud and mobile. “In the last year we’ve gone live with ServiceNow and implemented multiple cloud solutions,” Smoley said. “We’ve also made some big investments this year in tools that allow us to monitor data. We’ve moved to an ‘any device anywhere’ approach,” he continued.

Cybersecurity in the cloud

Moving to the cloud carries risk, and cybersecurity, especially in the pharmaceutical industry, becomes even more important. AstraZeneca’s CISO faces as much pressure as Smoley, if not more. Regarding his colleague and other CISOs, Smoley said that reporting hierarchy is a minor concern.

“The most important thing is not the reporting relationship, but the effectivity of the individual,” he said. “Do they have the right relationship with government, with third-party experts, and with other CISOs so that they are sharing information?”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 15.