Trade Secret & IP Protection
Visualize your safeguarded digital economy
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.
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
Balancing Confidentiality Across Multiple Parties
Establishing and enforcing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or Proprietary Information and Invention Assignment (PIIA) contracts with various parties, including customers, partners, outsourcing partners, and strategic suppliers, proves challenging. It requires management of joint intellectual property (IP) and information sharing agreements among multiple partners while navigating diverse interests and ensuring compliance across all parties involved. Moreover, maintaining confidentiality while fostering collaboration and innovation poses a delicate balance, especially in industries where information exchange is essential for success.
Insider Risks
Global companies face significant insider risks due to diverse operations and workforce, particularly concerning trade secret protection. Insider threats arise when employees compromise sensitive information, posing a significant risk. The complexity of global operations amplifies these risks, given diverse regional norms, legal frameworks, and regulations. To manage risks effectively, organizations must implement consistent data security measures across locations while adhering to local regulatory requirements.
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.
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:
Distributed Policy Engine
Companies spanning various regions and networks require a distributed policy engine to maintain uniform enforcement of security policies across disparate environments. By decentralizing policy management and enforcement, trade secrets can be shared confidentially among stakeholders, regardless of geographical locations. This approach streamlines policy administration and mitigates the risk of inconsistencies or gaps in security measures, enhancing over data protection and reducing potential data breaches.
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 business-critical data with encryption and usage controls, both at rest and in motion. Furthermore, fine-grained access controls provide flexibility and an extra layer of control over IP data that is managed in applications. Additionally, data loss prevention ensures that IP distribution and communications are limited to only secure, approved apps and channels to avoid leakage.
Automation and Prevention
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.
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.
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.
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.
Data Access Enforcer (DAE) Data-Level Security Controls
Trade secrets in the form of structured data need to be partitioned so customers can only view their own data, ensuring compliance with contractual agreements. NextLabs’ Data Access Enforcer (DAE) provides dynamic data-security controls such as data masking and data segregation to ensure authorized users can only access the data on a need-to-know basis. Dynamic data masking uses policies to mask sensitive data in the unauthorized fields based on attributes, while record-level data segregation and filtering allow users to only view the records or data they are permitted to.
Application Integration
Organizations store IP data across multiple applications, creating the need to secure data across a wide landscape. With NextLabs Application Integration solution, companies can seamlessly integrate their 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 for these applications, 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.
