Trade Secret & IP Protection
Protect your Digital Core
As surveyed by Business Research and Development Survey (BRDS), 51.7% of U.S. businesses that performed or invested in R&D viewed trade secrets to be highly important to their organization. Safeguarding trade secrets is a significant challenge for organizations, especially in today’s competitive global business environment. The growing sophistication of corporate espionage, cyberattacks, insider threats, and the global nature of trade collectively threaten the confidentiality of proprietary information.Â
A New Approach to Enterprise Digital Rights Management (EDRM)
Discover a fresh perspective on Information Rights Management (IRM) and key issues in the traditional approach
Siemens Teamcenter Digital Rights Management
Learn how to extend Teamcenter security to protect files in & outside of Teamcenter and throughout its lifecycle
Intellectual Property Protection
Explore a unified policy set for secure, compliant collaboration within and outside the enterprise, preventing intellectual property misuse and improper disclosure
Challenges
Balancing Confidentiality Across Multiple Parties
Establishing and enforcing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or Proprietary Information and Invention Assignment (PIIA) contracts with customers, partners, and suppliers is challenging. It requires managing joint intellectual property (IP) and information sharing while ensuring compliance among diverse parties. Violations can result in legal disputes, financial penalties, reputational damage, and loss of stakeholder trust.Â
Insider Risks
Global companies face significant insider risks due to diverse operations and workforce, especially with trade secret protection, as seen by the General Electric (GE) case. Insider threats arise when employees compromise sensitive information. The complexity of global operations amplifies these risks due to diverse regional norms, legal frameworks, and regulations. Effective risk management requires consistent data security measures across locations while adhering to local regulatory requirements.Â
Outsourcing to Foreign Partners
Outsourcing through offshore external partners limits control over sensitive information handling and presents complexities in legal and jurisdictional enforcement due to varying standards of IP protection across different countries. This heightens the risk of unauthorized access, misappropriation, or inadvertent disclosure of trade secrets, necessitating the implementation of data security controls to mitigate data leaks and breaches. Â
Protect Crown Jewels with a Data-Centric Security Approach
Sharing sensitive information within organizations and across the enterprise is often unavoidable. To maintain control over confidential information shared and prevent the risk of unauthorized access, organizations need to implement a comprehensive and proactive approach that includes the following:Â
- Distributed Policy Engine
Companies with diverse operations need a distributed policy engine for consistent security policy enforcement across disparate environments. Decentralizing policy management allows confidential sharing of trade secrets among different stakeholders across locations, streamlining administration and reducing the risk of inconsistencies or gaps in security measures, thereby enhancing data protection and minimizing data breaches.Â
- Data-Centric Security Enforcement ​
Protecting trade secrets entails using data-centric security controls for confidential sharing across locations and recipients. Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology secures enterprise data with encryption and usage controls, both at rest and in motion, while fine-grained access controls add flexibility and control over IP data managed in applications. Data loss prevention limits IP distribution to secure, approved apps and channels, preventing leakage.Â
- Automate & Prevent ​
The policy engine centrally manages, updates, and automates security controls, ensuring universal policy enforcement. It integrates with systems and applications to automatically protect files based on policies, preventing wrongful disclosure and unauthorized modification. With automated classification, access controls, and rights protection, manual errors are eliminated.Â
- Real-time Logging and Visibility​
Real-time logging records data activities and transactions continuously and instantly across various sources within an information system. Centralizing these records provides organizations with full visibility, enabling prompt risk detection and proactive monitoring through alerts, thus minimizing security breach impacts.Â
NextLabs Solution
CloudAz Unified Policy Platform
CloudAz uses a business-friendly policy language that enables users to create and manage policies without any code changes or application downtime. Data owners can secure IP data by controlling permissions and administrators can manage policies based on attributes such as subject, domain, and customers. Moreover, CloudAz enables the delegation of policy administration such that different users can have the responsibility of authorizing policies and different policy set can be constructed based on the subject or customer, streamlining the policy approval workflow.Â
SkyDRM Digital Rights Management
SkyDRM provides automated rights protection through encrypting, identifying, and authorizing policies to secure files. Digital rights can be applied to shared files, allowing data owners to control usage permissions, and the file is persistently protected regardless of location. SkyDRM can be integrated into applications such as SharePoint, PLM and CAD to safeguard data stored within the applications and when it leaves the application, ensuring secure collaboration while minimizing the risk of IP theft and leakage of trade secrets.Â
SkyDRM Digital Rights Management
SkyDRM provides automated rights protection through encrypting, identifying, and authorizing policies to secure files. Digital rights can be applied to shared files, allowing data owners to control usage permissions, and the file is persistently protected regardless of location. SkyDRM can be integrated into applications such as SharePoint, PLM and CAD to safeguard data stored within the applications and when it leaves the application, ensuring secure collaboration while minimizing the risk of IP theft and leakage of trade secrets.Â
Data Access Enforcer (DAE) Data-Level Security Controls
NextLabs’ DAE partitions structured data so customers only see their own, ensuring contract compliance. DAE offers dynamic data-security controls like data masking and segregation, limiting access to authorized users on a need-to-know basis, mitigating risk when sharing information with offshore external partners. Dynamic data masking hides sensitive data in unauthorized fields based on attributes, while record-level data segregation and filtering allow viewing only permitted records or data.Â
Application Integration
Organizations need to secure IP data across various applications to maintain confidentiality. NextLabs’ Application Integration seamlessly integrates applications into CloudAz using a software development kit (SDK), with a low or zero code approach. This enables centralized management and enforcement of security policies, simplifying the deployment process and reducing the time costs and high expenses required for customized integration.
CloudAz Report Server
CloudAz provides a built-in message feature that prompts user validation for risky actions while proactively monitoring user and data activities, preventing policy violation. Data and user activity logs can be monitored from a centralized interface via the Control Center dashboard that provides real-time insights into data usage and security events. This enables administrators to identify anomalies, track user behavior, and detect potential threats, preventing data leaks and breaches.Â
CloudAz Report Server
CloudAz provides a built-in message feature that prompts user validation for risky actions while proactively monitoring user and data activities, preventing policy violation. Data and user activity logs can be monitored from a centralized interface via the Control Center dashboard that provides real-time insights into data usage and security events. This enables administrators to identify anomalies, track user behavior, and detect potential threats, preventing data leaks and breaches.Â
