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Communications and Media
Data-Centric Security (DCS) solutions with the fastest time-to-value and superior user experienceÂ
Communications and media companies operate in highly digital environments with customer and business data, communication services, digital content, cloud platforms, and complex partner networks. Unauthorized access, data leaks, or misuse of sensitive information can create privacy risks, IP exposure, revenue loss, and erosion of customer trust. Protecting customer privacy and sensitive business data requires centralized access controls, consistent data governance, and robust data-centric security (DCS) as key enablers.Â
Protecting Customer, Business, and Digital Data
Learn how NextLabs Zero Trust Data-Centric Security can protect sensitive business information across enterprise systems, cloud environments, and partner ecosystems.
Secure Business Information Sharing with SkyDRM
Protect sensitive business information with enterprise digital rights management (E-DRM) when sharing with internal teams and external partners.
Safeguard AI with Zero Trust Architecture and Data-Centric Security
Explore how zero trust architecture and data-centric security help safeguard AI systems, models, and sensitive data.
Challenges
Data Privacy
Communications and media organizations such as Deutsche Telekom (DT) collect and process large volumes of customer data, including personally identifiable information (PII), account and billing information, location data, and service preferences. This data enables personalized experiences and business insights but also creates significant privacy and security obligations such as GDPR and CCPA. Unauthorized access or disclosure can result in regulatory penalties, loss of customer trust, and revenue impact. Ensuring continuous protection and governance of customer and business data is essential to maintaining trust and meeting evolving privacy requirements.Â
Protection of Sensitive Business Information
Confidential business information including financial data, multi-tier pricing structures, service offerings, customer and partner contracts, contract orders, vendor agreements, and third-party syndication arrangements is often shared across internal teams, business customers, partners, service providers, and other third parties. This broad sharing environment increases the risk of unauthorized access or misuse. Exposure of sensitive business data can weaken negotiating positions, create contractual and compliance risks, impact revenue opportunities, and reduce competitive advantage. Maintaining control over this information wherever it is shared is critical to protecting business value.
Data Security During Joint Ventures, Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures
Joint ventures, mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures can create complex data security challenges as communications and media companies share, combine, transfer, or separate business operations and data. Sensitive information such as customer data, financial records, contracts, intellectual property, and business plans may need to move across different organizations, systems, and stakeholders. Maintaining appropriate access and data separation throughout these transitions is critical to prevent unauthorized exposure and ensure sensitive information is only accessible to the right parties.Â
Content Protection and IP Exposure
Communications and media companies manage valuable intellectual property (IP), including network architecture and configurations, service designs, technical specifications, product roadmaps, proprietary technologies, and digital content. Unauthorized access, leaks, or misuse of this information can expose commercially sensitive IP, weaken competitive advantage, and result in financial and reputational damage. As sensitive IP is shared across engineering teams, cloud environments, technology partners, service providers, and other third parties, maintaining control becomes increasingly challenging. Protecting IP throughout its lifecycle helps prevent unauthorized use, disclosure, and distribution while preserving business value and competitive advantage.
Enabling Secure Data Access Across Communications and Media Workflows
To address growing risks around data privacy, sensitive business information, organizational change, and intellectual property, Communications and Media organizations must adopt a Zero Trust Data-Centric Security (ZT-DCS) approach that automates security, enables persistent protection, and enforces consistent data governance controls.Â
- Centralized Policy Platform
A centralized policy platform provides consistent access control and policy enforcement across enterprise applications, cloud systems, data repositories, and partner environments. Using attribute-based access control (ABAC), policies dynamically evaluate contextual factors such as user role, device, location, and data classification before granting access. This strengthens data privacy and confidentiality by ensuring sensitive customers, partners, and business information is accessible only to authorized users based on need-to-know.Â
- Data-Centric Security Controls
Data-centric security controls protect sensitive information throughout its lifecycle – whether data is at rest, in use, and in transit. Digital Rights Management (DRM) provides persistent protection for business files and digital assets, controlling how information can be accessed, shared, copied, or redistributed even after it leaves the organization’s environment. Dynamic data masking supports data privacy by protecting sensitive customer data from unnecessary exposure. Data filtering maintains data confidentiality by ensuring only relevant and authorized customer, partner, and business information is accessible to authorized users. Together, these controls strengthen data privacy and confidentiality while enabling secure business operations and collaboration.
- Automate and Prevent
Automated policy enforcement enables real-time decisions on how sensitive data can be accessed, used, or shared. By continuously evaluating access requests against policies, organizations can automatically prevent unauthorized downloads, excessive data transfers, policy violations, and inappropriate use of sensitive content or business information. This reduces insider risks, prevents data leakage, and ensures consistent protection across internal teams, enterprise workflows, and external partners.
- Single Central Control Plane
A single central control plane provides unified visibility and control over how sensitive data is accessed, used, and shared across enterprise systems and workflows. Automated controls, audit trails, dashboards, and usage analytics provide insights that may be difficult to achieve across disconnected systems. This centralized view helps organizations optimize operations, identify security gaps and anomalies early, and address potential risks before they escalate. It also strengthens data protection and supports regulatory compliance through greater visibility and consistent oversight.
NextLabs Solution
CloudAz Centralized Policy Platform
CloudAz centralizes attribute-based access policies across cloud, SaaS, on-premises, and enterprise applications. It enables real-time, context-aware policy decisioning by evaluating attributes such as user role, data sensitivity, device, and location to dynamically determine and enforce access to customer data, service information, partner data, and confidential business documents.
Application Enforcer
NextLabs Application Enforcer integrates seamlessly with enterprise applications such as Microsoft 365, SAP, and Salesforce to enforce policy-based controls directly within content management, ERP, CRM, and collaboration workflows. This enables organizations to control access to and use of business documents, customer records, and business transactions, while enforcing real-time segregation of duties (SoD) policies to prevent unauthorized actions and misuse.Â
SkyDRM Digital Rights Management
As sensitive business information, such as financial data, customer and partner contracts, pricing information, business plans, and other confidential documents, is shared across internal teams, business partners, and collaboration environments, organizations need persistent protection that remains with the data beyond traditional security boundaries. NextLabs’ SkyDRM Enterprise Digital Rights Management (E-DRM) enables files to be automatically or manually protected with company-defined usage rights and policy-driven controls. These controls dynamically govern how files can be accessed, modified, copied, or shared based on factors such as user identity, data classification, and contextual attributes. This helps prevent unauthorized disclosure, misuse, or redistribution while ensuring sensitive business information remains protected wherever it is accessed or shared.Â
Data Access Enforcer (DAE)
Nextlabs’ Data Access Enforcer (DAE) dynamically controls data visibility and exposure at the data layer, enabling organizations to protect sensitive information through real-time data masking and filtering. By controlling how data is presented and accessed within enterprise systems, DAE minimizes unnecessary exposure of customer records, billing information, service data, network information, and operational datasets while enabling users to securely access the information required for business operations.
CloudAz Report Server
CloudAz Report Server supports a single central control plane by providing centralized auditing, logging, and reporting of data access activities and policy enforcement decisions. This enables Communications and Media organizations to maintain visibility into how customer information, partner data, service information, and confidential business records are accessed, used, and shared. It supports compliance, strengthens governance, and helps identify unauthorized access, policy violations, and potential data misuse across distributed ecosystems.
