Paul A. Tedesco

Introduction

Universities, contract research and early stage companies involved in drug discovery or development of platform technologies will often partner with larger firms. Patent applications are usually inappropriate during these preliminary phases, yet most of these collaborations require considerable transfer of files and data between and among different entities...a challenge for protecting trade secrets and other intellectual property.

As a company or university, when you think about protecting your data you will normally think immediately about the data itself. So you will most likely direct your protection processes toward the immediate protection of your data. You will watch the content of your data determining if the data is critical and needs to be protected. Not all of your data needs to be protected. You would monitor all of your outbound information that could be in many different formats. You would also monitor the output for you to meet the regulatory requirements. You would monitor your user and content based information, allowing specific users to use only specific information.