Protect Your Intellectual Property Portfolio

What type of confidential, sensitive or proprietary information did you keep after leaving your former company?

Source: Ponemon Institute “Data Loss Risks During Downsizing” (February 2009)
Survey respondents = 945 adults located in the US who were laid off, fired or changed jobs in the last 12 months.

Some folks say that the skillful exploitation of intellectual property may be the single biggest factor in business success today.  The area of DLP or data loss prevention is quickly emerging as a powerful use case for email archiving to help identify, monitor and protect your company’s confidential information.

Most established archiving vendors continue to tout their ability to:

1. Offload mailbox storage/management
2. Expedite legal discovery
3. Meet regulatory requirements for retention

But an archiving solution should also help serve as an alerting mechanism to flag potential data and IP (intellectual property) loss.

Don’t think YOU have any IP? Think again.
Important and confidential information may be walking out the door or even unintentionally leaked to others, even clients (e.g., client or price lists). This data can be categorized in 3 buckets:

Customer Data: This may include social security numbers, credit card numbers or health records.

Corporate Data: This umbrella includes your company’s financials, mergers and acquisitions, employee data and client lists.

Intellectual Property: Think patents, trademarks, source code, design documents or anything protected by law.

Recent articles about TJX, Heartland Payment Systems and CardSystems Solutions all suggest the growing threat of data leakage is real and can be both embarrassing and damaging.

As firms wrestle with regulatory compliance, privacy and data breach laws and the day-to-day management of corporate email, you may want to take a closer look at your ability to monitor your most valuable asset – your company’s collective IP.