Communications are important in any field, and that applies especially to one where the information can be especially technical. The biotech industry requires that a wide variety of people be kept in the loop; no product is created in a vacuum, and a new patent requires not only the scientists developing it to keep in communication, but also a number of legal specialists, marketers, and the executives in charge of the particular project. These individuals need to not only maintain communications, but those communications also need to be kept secure. As such, this makes corporate communications in the biotech industry a challenging prospect.
The Security Issues
The biotech industry is a multi-billion dollar industry; it involves so many different products that almost every other industry is linked to it one directly or otherwise. A lot of those products are developed as proprietary patents; they must belong to the company in question and no one else. This means that not only does the company need to protect its products from prying eyes of its competitors but also those of the companies that it works with. This makes for an industry rife with industrial espionage, where no one can be truly trusted lest a company make the mistake of trusting the wrong person.
Solutions
Communications thus need to be secure, and that security must be relatively easy to maintain. They also need to be easy to access for those working on the specific project. As such, a number of systems have been designed to make communications secure. Discussion boards on the company server are just the beginning, where a company has a number of projects working simultaneously at any given time; the permissions are an invisible but secure web to ensure that no one from one discussion even knowing about the other discussions. This also applies to email; the servers are kept under virtual lock and key and constantly monitored for any irregularities.
Even for those operating in the real world security is of the utmost concern. This means that papers need to be shredded every so often and that others must be stored. The company has a variety of protocols in place to determine how long the paperwork needs to be kept and how to dispose of it when it is no longer needed. This means that while records of conversations are kept for the purposes of in-company investigations as well as for personal notes, there are security protocols in place to make sure that the communications are kept secure.
Keeping It Secure
All of this means that corporate communications in the biotech industry are very secure; they are kept in the company and away from those who would use them for their own means. These protocols are usually easy to implement, at least from the user side, and ensure that the communications stay between those that need to know. As long as those protocols are followed it is easy to track communications and ensure that the company’s secrets are kept secret.
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