Hidada

Hidada, an engineering company in Saudi Arabia, uses SecureZIP to encrypt email attachments automatically. Its IT manager names the reason directly: protection that depends on a person remembering to apply it will eventually be skipped. Automating it removed that dependency, and the company reports data security increased by 75 to 90 percent, with a comparable share of the time previously spent on manual protection returned.

Background

This case study of Hidada is based on a December 2020 survey of PKWARE customers by TechValidate, a third-party research service.

The study is a December 2020 TechValidate survey. Engineering firms hold a particular mix of sensitive material, weighted toward drawings, specifications and intellectual property rather than toward customer records, and that weighting is reflected in what this organization chose to protect and how.

Challenges

The cybersecurity needs that most influenced their decision to use PKWARE solutions:

• Automation
• Zip file encryption

The compliance measures that most influenced their decision to use PKWARE solutions:

• GDPR

SecureZIP has helped address our concern for protecting sensitive documents being sent by email. Attachments can be zipped and encrypted automatically which not only saves time but also ensures that users don’t forget to protect them. Abdul Azeez Panambron, IT Manager

Automation and zip file encryption appear here as one requirement rather than two. Compression is already part of how large engineering files move, so encryption applied at that point adds no new step for the person sending the file. The alternative is a separate protection action performed after the file is prepared, and that is precisely the step that gets forgotten under deadline pressure.

Our Approach

Using PKWARE, this customer Improved protection of critical information and increased data security by 75 – 90%.

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Use Cases

The data types being protected with PKWARE:

• Confidential files
• Legal documents (patents, trademarks, etc.)

Data uncovered by PK Discovery is protected with:

• Encrypting

PKWARE functionality for data security is utilized with these additional use cases:

• Secure email with partners and customers
• DLP enhancement

Patents and trademarks sit in the protected set alongside confidential files, which is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. Intellectual property carries no breach notification duty in most jurisdictions, so its loss produces no regulatory event and no public disclosure, only competitive damage that may not surface for years. An organization protecting it is defending against a risk that nothing obliges it to measure.

Results

The immediate benefits they experienced following the deployment of PKWARE:

• Improved protection of critical information
• Increased data security by 75 – 90% after implementing PKWARE technology
• Saved 75 – 90% of time spent previously moving from manually applied protection to PKWARE

GDPR appears as a compliance driver for a company based outside the European Union, which is the ordinary case rather than an anomaly. The regulation follows the data subject rather than the office, so an engineering firm with European clients, suppliers or employees falls within its scope regardless of where it operates from.

Email is the channel that matters most in this account, and it is the one most organizations leave to individual judgement. Attachments are the ordinary way engineering documents leave a company, they are sent by people with no security role, and once sent they cannot be recalled. Automatic encryption is what converts that from a matter of diligence into a property of the system.