Maintaining Consumers’ Trust While Still Protecting Them

How does the pharma sector protect the confidentiality of intellectual property and customer-related data?

How to balance applying multiple lines of defence but still maintaining the customer’s level of convenience and trust?

A lot of defences go largely unnoticed to a customer however, defences that could cause an impact by hindering someone from doing their job responsibly is a fast track to failure. Building trust initially by understanding business use cases and securing around that is the first step. Once credibility is established, more robust measures can be introduced that may change the way the customer works but can further lay the foundations of good hygiene.

How to mitigate human error to create the best data security?

• Comprehensive mandatory training and awareness programs.
• Reduce privileges where possible so in the event of an error, impact is lessened.
• Ensure only authorized personnel can access privileged data.

What are the main specifics of cyber security in the pharma industry?

Just like many other industries, the preservation of confidentiality of intellectual property is paramount, as well as any data related to our product’s customers. Pharma is an interesting field in the sense that it has an ongoing relationship with some of its customers to ensure that the product can be the best and most effective. Ensuring the confidentiality of our customer’s PII and PHI is a top priority as a result.

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Richey Ward is a Threat Hunting & Response Director at Novartis. He is an Infosec Professional with 10+ years of experience in Digital Forensics, Incident Response and Threat Hunting across multiple major multinationals.