The health and life sciences industry is transforming rapidly. Precision medicine, shifting regulatory expectations, increasingly complex datasets, and the move toward patient centricity all require analytics platforms that can deliver speed, scalability, and strong governance. For organizations still working in SAS 9.4, migrating to SAS Viya represents an opportunity to accelerate insights and modernize operations across clinical, regulatory, manufacturing, and commercial functions.
This post explores the benefits of migrating to SAS Viya for life sciences and how it can improve your organization.
Why Move from SAS 9.4 to SAS Viya?
SAS Viya is positioned as a faster, more productive data and AI platform, designed specifically to help life sciences organizations:
- Deliver data-driven decisions more efficiently
- Support collaboration across scientific, business, and technical teams
- Improve performance for analytics workloads
- Enhance regulatory compliance
- Prepare for the next generation of AI capabilities
SAS Viya helps answer the following questions many organizations face today:
- How do I design better clinical trials?
- How do I reduce the risk of non-compliance?
- How do I accelerate time to insight?
- How do I get more value from real-world data?
- How can I predict demand?
- How do I improve commercialization strategies?
What SAS Viya Brings to Life Sciences
1. Faster Performance & Lower Cloud Costs
Independent research from The Futurum Group, referenced on the webpage, found that SAS Viya delivers:
- 30× faster computation time on average
- 86% cloud cost savings
- 4.6× greater productivity for data and AI teams
This speed and efficiency is a major advantage for workloads like clinical trial analysis, real world data processing, and operational forecasting.
2. A Unified Platform for All Users
SAS Viya supports:
- Data scientists
- Business analysts
- IT teams
- Users who prefer SAS, Python, R, SQL
- Users who prefer no code / low code interfaces
This reduces silos and allows teams to collaborate more effectively, especially across distributed clinical, regulatory, and operational environments.
3. Transparent, Trustworthy AI
The platform includes:
- Embedded model interpretability
- Fairness and bias monitoring
- Transparent insights with robust governance
Life sciences teams benefit from improved oversight and traceability — crucial for maintaining compliance with regulatory authorities.
4. Cloud-Native Flexibility
SAS Viya has the ability to integrate across:
- Cloud-native environments
- Cloud-agnostic deployments
- Large and small enterprises
This flexibility helps organizations scale analytics, streamline infrastructure, and reduce operational overhead.
The Chiesi Group illustrates this: migrating to Viya helped them improve performance, centralize data views, and streamline compliance-focused data flow documentation. Read the story here.
SAS Viya’s Advanced Capabilities
Generative AI
SAS Viya:
- Provides secure GenAI orchestration
- Allows the integration of LLM outputs into business processes
- Includes industry-specialized assistants
- Enables low-code/no-code synthetic data generation
- Maintains compliance by protecting sensitive customer data
This helps life sciences organizations adopt generative AI safely.
AI Agents
SAS Viya is a platform for building AI agents that can:
- Sense real-time data
- Make decisions using advanced analytics
- Act autonomously on business tasks
- Maintain transparency and human oversight
These agents are designed to be trustworthy and regulated-industry-ready.
Key Benefits for Life Sciences
SAS Viya helps organizations:
- Collaborate better by using a unified analytics platform
- Make decisions you can trust, with interpretability and fairness tools
- Innovate faster across the analytics lifecycle
- Accelerate insights with AI-driven automation
- Adapt flexibly to cloud-native or cloud-agnostic environments
- Use multi-language programming options without workflow disruption
These capabilities directly support clinical development, regulatory compliance, operational efficiency, and commercialization.
Final Thoughts: The Future Belongs to Modern Analytics
Migrating from SAS 9.4 to SAS Viya isn’t just a technical upgrade—it’s a strategic transformation. Life sciences organizations leveraging Viya will be able to:
- Accelerate scientific discovery
- Improve patient outcomes
- Respond faster to regulatory demands
- Deliver insights at scale
- Prepare for the next decade of AI-driven innovation
With its unified platform, cloud-native flexibility, and embedded compliance features, SAS Viya provides a future-proof foundation for delivering trustworthy, high-impact analytics across the entire life sciences value chain.
For more information, see Viya For Life Sciences | SAS.
Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.
