InfoWatch: Protecting Intellectual Property

Prime Focus is a global Visual Entertainment Services group, providing high-end creative and technology services to the film, broadcast, commercials, gaming, internet, and media industries. They have 3,500 professionals employed in 16 facilities worldwide, hundreds of whom are working in India. One of Prime Focus' major corporate IT concerns in their Indian units, was how to safeguard the company's most valuable asset-its intellectual property-and to ensure protection from emerging threats coupled with intentional or inadvertent exposure of data. Since Prime Focus lists the BBC, Cornerstone Entertainment, the Brooklyn Brothers, Warner Bros Streetlight Films, and many other companies among its customers, this was no mean task.

Prime Focus chose InfoWatch Traffic Monitor as the solution provider to deliver local technical support to ensure seamless integration, wherein the implementation has been carried out by Comguard Group, a solutions integrator (SI) and one of InfoWatch's partners.
In the first phase of the implementation, Prime Focus created a dedicated data center where InfoWatch solution has been installed and all remote sub-locations and branches of Prime Focus in India centrally connected to it. Thus, all client subsidiaries over India will be covered by InfoWatch Traffic Monitor. In the next phase, Prime Focus will be deploying encryption and DRM solutions. The next phase project is scheduled to begin in July.

CHALLENGE

For a media services company, trust of customers and partners is crucial. Providing such a company with new movie or game ideas for production, the global international filming or gaming vendors want to be sure they stay confidential until official release date, because of the highest level of competitiveness in the entertainment market. Cases, when the competitors learn about upcoming projects and come up with the ready product first, are not that rare in the visual entertainment market.

Feroz Shaikh, VP, IT, Prime Focus said, "As a globally operating company, providing its customers end-to-end solutions from pre-production to final delivery, we were keen on keeping intellectual property of our customers protected against malicious or accidental leakage and disclosure. The emphasis was made on safeguarding video (movie) and text files (scripts). Hence, the requirement list included prevention of video and text files leaving corporate network and a unified archive for long-term storage of the information on activities with the data, to enable retrospective analysis when needed.

SOLUTION
Selecting the right solution, Prime Focus carefully studied all available alternatives to minimize the integration efforts and impact on existing IT infrastructure and ensure reliable intellectual property protection. Shaikh also added, "We were choosing from several vendors, including InfoWatch, a leading international company in data security technologies. InfoWatch offered Prime Focus its enterprise-grade internal data protection solution-InfoWatch Traffic Monitor Enterprise. The solution gives companies full control over their information flow and helps safeguarding intellectual property," pointed out Shaikh.

George Jason, VP, Comguard Networks said "We deployed solutions like InfoWatch Traffic Monitor Enterprise monitors that analyzes email, web, secure web and IM traffic, and controls local activities with the data (copying and printing). Several analysis technologies, such as in-house developed linguistic analysis, digital fingerprinting, and templates analyzer, provide high intellectual property detection reliability." The analysis results trigger automatic decision on whether emailing or copying this specific information would be a security policy violation and on how it should be processed further, for example, sent or blocked.

The decision is based on pre-defined security policies and rules that can be flexibly customized. The intercepted and analyzed data is stored in a centralized archive-Forensic Storage for retrospective analysis and investigations. "We not only offered a comprehensive reliable solution, but were also able to satisfy the specific Prime Focus demand for 64bit OS support, said Natalya Kaspersky, CEO, InfoWatch.

RESULTS
InfoWatch cooperation with the media company started from a pilot project. InfoWatch regional partner Comguard (Spectrum Group) supported Prime Focus during the implementation. Thanks to their high-quality technical support skills and focus on customer satisfaction, the integration of a comprehensive enterprise grade solution into the customer's IT infrastructure was carried out in a couple of days. Satisfied with the pilot project results, the customer extended the cooperation with a commercial agreement, thus validating the assurance in the choice of solution provider.

"Today, our Traffic Monitor Enterprise solution successfully safeguards Prime Focus' intellectual property and helps strengthen trustful relationships with customers and partners, said Kaspersky.

CUSTOMER REFERENCE
Competition in the visual entertainment market is really fierce today. Our customers share with us their future release plans and rely on our discretion in keeping them safe. To better serve the needs of our respected customers we decided to implement additional security measures-a special intellectual property protection solution. "We enjoyed working with InfoWatch team on this project; they not only offered us a comprehensive solution to prevent sensitive information leakage, but together with Comguard provided high-quality integration and support services," concluded Shaikh.