Do you know if you are keeping your IP (intellectual property) safe? Do you know where it is or who has accessed it? Last year the New York Times reported that the Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania filed a billion dollar dispute against their former scientific director and now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York over accusations that he walked away with groundbreaking research and used it to help start a valuable biotechnology company. Let me highlight that figure again – a billion dollars. A settlement was agreed upon, but that does not change the fact that significant money and resources were spent on this case; all around the non-protection and security of documents and content that contained intellectual property.

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For life science organizations, or any other company handling sensitive IP, investing millions if not billions in developing medicines or medical devices for example, you need to ensure your IP doesn’t walk out the door with your employees at the end of the day. At the same time, you rely on collaboration to develop medical advances. How can you balance the need to protect your IP and allow collaboration? How can you see who is accessing your content and track usage?

Many life science organizations are turning to SharePoint (43% as reported by CMS Wire) because of its collaborative features; however these organizations also need a solution for securing that content. See my previous post on the topic here.

In this post I want to focus on tracking content. Organizations turn to SharePoint to open the business to significant collaboration benefits, but it also creates many opportunities for data to leak out. As a result, organizations that manage regulated and confidential information, especially IP, in SharePoint require the ability to track the entire lifecycle of a specific document in the event of a breach.

You should have the ability to audit who viewed a document, distributed it, printed it or saved it. Furthermore, you should also have the capability to prevent users from accessing, printing, distributing or saving a document in the first place, unless they have the proper credentials.

Fearful that users will consider this policing? A recent Symantec survey showed “half of employees admit to taking corporate data when they leave a job, and 40 percent say they plan to use the data in their new job.” The bottom line is when you are spending millions on IP, you need to protect it because the cost of IP theft is huge.

I want to point out that tracking IP isn’t just a priority for life sciences. Any company managing IP needs to protect it. The ability to secure and track the lifecycle of sensitive documents helps to better protect your business and competitive advantage.

Learn more about data tracking and securing IP in SharePoint. If you would like to add to this blog or ask Kurt a questions please leave a comment below.

This article was wrote by Kurt Mueffelmann, HiSoftware. HiSoftware are signed up as silver exhibitors for ESPC14.