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In today’s global economy the value of an enterprise’s Intellectual Property (IP) assets is very important. In many companies however, IP is not only stored in well protected or encrypted repositories, but also resides on personal computers, laptops, home computers, removable storage, in cloud locations such as BOX.net or in personal email boxes. This vast amount of big data is often unstructured, unprotected and of unclear ownership, exposing any IP to risk of theft or leakage. Implement an Intellectual Property Protection Program to protect these important assets.

Prevention and investigation of IP leakage and theft
With ZyLAB's eDiscovery and Information Risk Management System companies can locate Intellectual Property on their computer systems and actively prevent leakage or theft of this sensitive and valuable information. A user installable library containing best practice methodology for eDiscovery enables the automatic identification of files that may contain IP. The library is available as an add-on to the ZyLAB platform.

By automatically identifying information containing Intellectual Property, it is easy to identify employees with a disproportional amount of IP in their personal storage locations, email or other locations.

Periodic Risk Assessments
The consequences of a security breach can be very serious. We’re not only talking about the cost of resolving the breach and the potential loss of revenues, but a security breach also exposes a company to potential lawsuits. By supporting periodic risk assessments, ZyLAB helps organizations to optimize their information security and prevent data leakage. Our customers use our technology to identify miss-placed confidential documents or files containing IP. Or use it to identify users with large amounts of IP in email or files so appropriate action can be taken, before anything happens. Especially in case of fraud, IP theft or data leakage, prevention should be preferred over the cure.

Technology such as ZyLAB’s contains best practice templates, implementation guidelines, and customizable, multilingual libraries to localize and protect intellectual property.

So, what should you do? Here are some steps to follow:

• First, make sure that you fully known what types of intellectual property related data your organization has to maintain.
• Then, create different storage areas for different types of intellectual property data. Protect highly sensitive data by using encryption and additional access control.
• Most important: know what you have. Use data analytics tools to identify miss-placed intellectual property related information. Do not do this once, but do this on a regular basis.

By implementing these simple steps in combination with the right technology, you will be able to reduce the risks of intellectual property leaking outside your organization.