Enterprise Rights Management over the years has made great inroads into the protection of computer aided design files. 95% of CAD files represent intellectual property of businesses around the world, however the dark-side to CAD is that in electronic format can be emailed or transferred to another party without the knowledge of the owner of the content.

Today many designs are sent to countries like China, Indonesia and India for manufacturing with confidential disclosure contracts binding on the manufacturer, but what happens if a rogue employee gets hold of the designs and sells it on to other businesses? As an owner of intellectual property like computer aided designs you owe it to the survival of your business to make sure you can monitor where your IP is and be in control of it no matter where it may be located.

Some of the steps taken to protect your CAD files include using passwords which can be easily hacked using a password loggers and other password decoding utilities and is probably the last option to take when protecting your IP. I have known some companies, especially ones that manufacture inhouse to implement designs on computers that are not connected to the network, in almost all cases these designs are printed making them even easier to copy.

According to the U.S. Commerce Department, intellectual property theft is estimated at more than $250 billion and 750,000 jobs annually. The International Chamber of Commerce estimates the global fiscal loss to intellectual property theft is more than $600 billion per year.

A 2004 survey of 400 business professionals about their attitudes toward intellectual property theft conducted by Ibas, (www.ibas.net), a global supplier of data recovery and computer forensics, showed the following:

• 69.6% of employees surveyed have stolen some form of corporate intellectual property from their employer when leaving a job.
• 30.4% admitted to taking information such as customer databases and contact information.
• The most commonly used method for stealing intellectual property is to send electronic copies of documents and files to a personal email account.
• 58.7% of employees surveyed think that taking intellectual property is as acceptable, if not more, as exaggerating an insurance claim to cover the excess charge.
• Only 28.2% think that intellectual property theft is completely unacceptable.
• The most common justification for intellectual property theft was that the person had created the documents/files stolen and felt they partly belonged to him or her.

The attitude towards the theft of intellectual property has hardly changed since this survey was carried out in 2004, but change needs to be driven from the boardroom. However, insufficient data as well as monitoring makes it impossible for directors to know how much their businesses are hemorrhaging cash due to IP theft.

In the Enterprise Rights Management arena companies like Fasoo, GigaTrust and Liquid Machines now owned by Check Point Technologies are at the forefront of using persistent security to protect CAD files. Any business serious about protecting their CAD files from theft should investigate Enterprise Rights Management and deploy it as solution to gain tight reign on possible information leaks.

Theft of IP and sensitive data represent a clear and present danger to all types of businesses, especially the global brands and immediate action is required to identify areas of possible leaks and plugging the holes. Not safeguarding your IP and confidential or sensitive data puts your revenue stream, employees’ future and the future of your business at risk if no action is taken.