Unlock Value, Not Risk: Securing Sensitive Data Across the Life Sciences Supply Chain

In pharma and biotech, data is the product long before the pill, therapy, or device. It's the IP driving your next breakthrough. It’s the trial results that build your case, the patient data that validates your science, and the contracts that move it all forward. It’s always very important and it’s almost always sensitive. This makes it an asset that needs protecting.

So if data is this valuable, why are we still treating it like an afterthought?

While industries talk about “digital transformation,” life sciences is already there. R&D, clinical operations, regulatory, manufacturing, and commercialization all rely on sensitive data flowing across CROs, CMOs, labs, regulatory agencies, and internal teams. But here’s the catch: the more that data moves, the more exposed it becomes.

This means managing many very important moving parts, and the risks of getting it wrong are huge. Most organizations can’t accurately answer this simple question: “Where is our most sensitive data right now, and who has access to it?”

Without that answer, data security becomes more difficult. This is especially true for the unstructured data that makes up 80% of most enterprise data inventories.

The Reality: Unstructured Sensitive Data Is Your Blind Spot

While data-driven work has created a need for more dynamic data protection solutions, most organizations are still catching up. Everyone’s still heavily invested in perimeter security: firewalls, VPNs, identity and access controls, and defenses in the cloud. But the moment that sensitive file—your protocol, your regulatory strategy, your CDMO contract—leaves your core system, it’s vulnerable.  Every time it gets accessed, emailed, downloaded, or shared for collaboration, the risk is magnified. 

Because the truth is, most of this sensitive information lives in unstructured formats:

• Word docs with confidential research

• Patient and laboratory imaging files 

• Spreadsheets holding patient data

• PowerPoints presenting your IP strategy of contracts, submissions, or MSAs

• Omics datasets

No matter the format, unstructured data doesn’t sit nicely in a database. Traditional data loss prevention tools (DLPs) can’t see it or classify it, and data security posture management tools (DSPMs) can’t protect it once it’s in motion, especially outside your environment.

Yet this vital, sensitive, unstructured data is exactly what’s being created and shared every day across your supply chain. If you’re not actively protecting it at the data or object level, you’re relying on everyone else’s security practices to keep your business safe.

How confident does that make you feel?

Sharing Is Inevitable—So Make It Secure

Collaboration is fundamental to life sciences discovery: you can’t innovate alone. CROs accelerate your trials. CMOs make your treatments real. Partners bring you reach, capacity, and insight. But collaboration without control is a risk multiplier, leading many orgs to lean even heavier on those traditional perimeters

What if instead of locking things down, you made sensitive data inherently safe to share? What if you took a data-centric approach to securing your work, balancing strong data protection with streamlined access and usability?

With a data-centric security approach, you don’t just discover sensitive content, you protect it before it ever leaves your environment.

• Files are classified automatically.

• Encryption is applied intelligently, based on context.

• Access policies follow the file no matter where it goes.

• Rights can be revoked remotely, instantly.

• Access and activity logs are also persistent, making compliance simple.

It’s protection that doesn’t rely on trusting every endpoint or partner system. Because let’s face it: trust is not a strategy.

Stop Letting Your Data Leak Value

You wouldn’t hand over your compound formulas or trade secrets without an airtight NDA. But every day, sensitive data is shared with third parties with nothing more than a weak assumption of confidentiality.

That assumption doesn’t hold up in audits. It doesn’t satisfy regulators (including a new EO on bulk data sharing), and it sure doesn’t stop a breach.

If data is your most valuable asset, protecting it needs to be built into your operation, not bolted on at the end.

It’s time to stop asking, “How do we collaborate securely?” and start asking, “Why are we collaborating without protection in the first place?”

Your IP. Your Evidence. Your Advantage. Your obligation.

Every document in your ecosystem has a purpose—and a risk profile. Knowing what’s in your files, where they live, and who they touch isn’t just a nice dashboard feature. It’s the foundation for secure collaboration, operational speed, and trust with regulators, partners, and patients.

Sensitive data is not just something to protect. It’s something to build and control, intentionally.

So go ahead and share your science, move your trials, and close your partnerships. Just don’t do it unprotected.

👉 Explore how we protect pharma’s most sensitive data