Protection of intellectual property is an extremely important condition for the effective functioning of an enterprise and one of the key areas of economic security. This article will consider how to avoid data leaks with the help of Data Room software.
What are intellectual property leaks?
Companies, whose main asset is information, do their best to protect their own developments. If competitors gain access to them, they will save millions of man-hours spent on creating intellectual property and can do without the significant financial investment that accompanies any development of something new.
Among the main reasons for the emergence of threats is high competition among enterprises, the need to constantly improve existing technologies and processes at the enterprise, the emergence of information, computing, and telecommunications equipment, which requires a special attitude to protection, the need for enterprises to use the latest information technologies, research, and development in terms of creating new products, goods, etc., the impossibility of stable operation of the enterprise without ensuring an adequate level of security of intellectual property.
The activities of modern organizations require the storage and use of more and more information, which is facilitated by the reduction in the cost of computing power, the bandwidth of networks, and storage systems. At the same time, the risks of information leakage, pressure from regulators, and stakeholder expectations regarding information security are growing.
With the growing risks of industrial espionage and intellectual property theft, organizations need to take the following immediate action:
- determine the information used;
- assess the consequences and likelihood of a leak;
- develop a strategy to prevent leaks;
- introduce the missing information protection means.
Virtual Data Room: how to protect a company from intellectual property theft?
There are many ways to protect intellectual property. By posting your materials on the Internet, you must be sure that your objects are reliably protected and nothing threatens your rights. In this case, Virtual Data Room is the best information protection means.
Documents and files are highly protected in online Data Rooms. The offer the following security measures:
- Multi-factor authentication
In addition to entering a corporate username and password for accessing corporate systems in the cloud, it is recommended to configure stricter user authentication. During authorization, employees will need to not only enter a domain name but also use authenticator tokens. This will provide you with a higher level of security when working in the Data Room.
- Digital watermarks
A Data Room service offers the highest possible protection when exchanging confidential data through data encryption during transmission and storage. In addition, particularly sensitive documents can be protected against download and with a watermark.
- Access control
Detailed access rights in the Data Room regulate which users can only read, download or edit data. And administrators of the room have full control over all processes in the Data Room at all times via activity logs.
- Cryptographic protection
This kind of protection covers all stages of processing electronic documents from the time of their creation to storage in the archives. Encryption is the conversion of data to code that requires a password or pair of “keys” to decode. Data may be encrypted at many levels, at multiple stages of the data lifecycle, and through a variety of software and hardware packages.
Many Virtual Data Room providers have configured their platforms to comply with various industry, federal, and international regulations to keep files safe on the cloud.