A pharmaceutical company is migrating its systems and infrastructure to the cloud. Due to security restrictions and regulatory policies, the company Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is concerned about mo

Reviewing compliance requirements first establishes the regulatory framework - such as HIPAA, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, or GxP guidelines - that governs how pharmaceutical data must be stored, processed, and protected. This step defines the constraints and conditions under which a cloud migration may legally proceed, and it must precede all technical or policy decisions.

Applying audit and compliance requirements presupposes that you already know what those requirements are, making this a second step that cannot happen before the initial review.

Reviewing internal company security policies is important but insufficient on its own, because internal policies may not capture all external regulatory obligations that apply to pharmaceutical data in the cloud.

Updating security tools is a technical implementation step that can only be scoped and executed after the applicable compliance requirements have been identified and understood.