Protect IP While Enabling Secure Collaboration

The NextLabs Design & Manufacturing solution helps companies protect intellectual property (IP), customer and project information, and other sensitive data by ensuring its appropriate access, use, and disclosure in accordance with company information-handling policies and applicable regulatory compliance requirements.

The solution consistently applies access control policies across enterprise systems and repositories that create, manage, transport, and store sensitive data, including ERP systems; PDM, PLM, and CAD systems; Microsoft SharePoint; Outlook Email; and home-grown applications. The solution protects data in the applications and when it leaves the application to be shared internally or externally. Protection remains persistent regardless of where the data goes and how it is accessed.

NextLabs enables businesses to:

  • Control internal and external information flow to avoid communication and collaboration that results in improper sharing or disclosure of company IP, customer or project information, or other sensitive data.
  • Ensure only people associated with a project with proper qualifications have access to certain information.
  • Enforce fine-grained policies to ensure only authorized users can share specific information with appropriate parties.
  • Ensure that all applicable regulatory compliance access control requirements are met.
  • Create consolidated reports on access activity to all sensitive data across the enterprise; discover and remediate access risks to improve compliance with corporate and statutory policies governing access to sensitive data.

The solution protects company trade secrets and confidential information to enable safe collaboration and communication during research and development activities with supply chain and other partners. Companies identify critical IP, customer and project information, and other sensitive data, and define policies to control access, use and disclosure. Centralized policies apply the appropriate level of protection to varying levels of classified information. Policy sets can be customized or used as templates to create new policies.

Intellectual Property and Customer Data Protection

  • Limit the sharing of R&D project details, preliminary product test results, and secret formulas and recipes to those who are required to use that data.
  • Prevent users from distributing customer design files outside of the customer’s project team (including local design teams and extended partner teams).
  • Allow CAD/CAM/EDA files to be saved only on a customer’s encrypted file server directories and portal sites.
  • When customer projects are completed, automatically archive project files, and adjust data access rights of project team members appropriately.
  • Allow CAD/CAM designs to be emailed only to recipients who are part of a specific project, whether inside or outside the enterprise.

Regulatory Compliance

  • Simplify the task of meeting complex and sometimes overlapping regulatory compliance requirements at the local, regional, national, and international levels that may limit the access to and distribution of specific data that is created, managed, shared, and stored across the enterprise.
  • Generate fully transparent compliance reports that demonstrate compliance with all applicable regulations.

End-to-end Data Protection and Monitoring

  • Data is protected when it is inside of the application and after it leaves the application and is being shared. Protection persists throughout the lifecycle of the data.
  • Centralized visibility enables organizations to prevent unintended sharing of data and maintain comprehensive reporting for audit and compliance purposes.
  • Allows only approved personnel (such as project managers) to copy, print, and download customer intellectual property; data is automatically encrypted.
WHITEPAPER

MANAGING INFORMATION RISK FOR MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT

This whitepaper addresses striking the right balance between collaboration and governance when using Microsoft SharePoint within enterprises.

SOLUTION BRIEF

DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING

Learn how design & manufacturing companies can centrally manage and control risk with NextLabs.

CASE STUDY

DOW

Learn how Dow relies on NextLabs for export control and protection of intellectual property.