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Computerworld - According to a survey by Accenture Ltd., approximately 60% to 80% of your company's assets are represented by intangible assets such as intellectual property, or IP.
IP includes things such as patents, trademarks, brands, trade secrets, designs, architectures, copyrights, algorithms, software code, hardware schematics, inventions, business processes and many other assets. These are properties that may or may not have a physical presence. They exist mostly in the digital world.
A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Society for Industrial Security International estimated that U.S. companies lost up to $59 billion in intellectual property and proprietary information between July 2000 and June 2001. The largest average dollar value of loss per incident occurred in research and development ($404,000), followed by financial data ($356,000).
This probably isn't surprising to information security professionals, since most IP leaks involve insiders. Insiders are generally considered trusted users who have access to a network, whether they are connected on the internal LAN or through virtual private networks. Insiders can be current and former employees, contractors or business partners.
Any one of these people could be dissatisfied and decide to send a few design specs to a competitor. Once the secret is out, it's extremely difficult to contain. IP litigation, if you choose to go that route, can cost from several hundred thousand dollars to several million dollars. This amount doesn't even include the cost due to loss of reputation, brand, speed to market and other factors.
So how does a company go about securing its IP and make sure access to IP is tracked?
Enterprise content management
The first class of companies to attack this problem is the enterprise content management (ECM) vendors, such as FileNet Corp., Documentum Inc., Interwoven Inc., Open Text Corp., Stellent Inc. and Vignette Corp. These vendors generally provide centralized document management capabilities that allow users to:

• Organize and classify electronic documents


• Search documents using keywords


• Share documents with other users


• Check in and check out documents for editing


• Version control for all documents


• Audit all access to documents

These vendors' main solution to the IP leakage problem is to ensure that all access to electronic documents is recorded and reported. These vendors' products will help manage and track documents when they're stored centrally on the server. These products can track who has accessed which file at what time, how many times files are accessed and how often people access these files.
Some of the more sophisticated products can also tell you the access behavior by individual users. For example, if a