Intralinks® and Premiership Rugby tackle document protection

About Premiership Rugby

Premiership Rugby represents the 12 professional rugby clubs in England which play in Aviva Premiership Rugby, the European Champions Cup and the European Challenge Cup. Premiership Rugby acts on behalf of the clubs in commercial negotiations with partners, broadcasters and league sponsors. It is also responsible Salary Cap and Minimum Standards Criteria as well as having delegated authority from the Rugby Football Union to manage and administer the 135 Aviva Premiership Rugby matches, of which 69 are broadcast live on BT Sport and distributed worldwide.

The Scrum

Premiership Rugby’s partnerships division is responsible for managing the relationship with official sponsors, partners, suppliers and potential partners - and prior to its work with Intralinks, document protection was a trying task.

Its partner base all possess a global network of brand agencies and internal stakeholders, all of whom need to be heavily involved in the orchestration of sponsorship agreements, and the creation of marketing collateral in association with the partnership. These networks are incredibly dense, and ensuring all the correct people see the right pieces of sensitive content in a controlled environment became very time-consuming for the partnerships team at Premiership Rugby.

“It got to the stage where we had no idea who was seeing what document,” said Paul Sherrell, Head of Partnerships at Premiership Rugby.  “We were using the likes of email, courier and consumer-grade sync and share technologies to try and share very bulky sensitive files with all of our partners and our partners’ networks.  But, we had no control over who was viewing these documents, and we ended up wasting a lot of time trying to send files to users using different means of communication, all of which were insecure.”

Premiership Rugby became aware of the growing problem, which was escalating as more sponsors came on board, and realised it needed a central repository within which it can create workspaces to store and collaborate on different documents with each partner - all while retaining control over who saw each file and how long each file existed.

Converting to Intralinks®

Premiership Rugby decided to deploy Intralinks® to share its confidential information with its partners.  In using Intralinks, Premiership Rugby is able to communicate with its network securely, allowing it to share confidential information, such as contract negotiations, presentations, guidelines, image banks and critical processes with hundreds of users associated with its partner organisations. 

“We chose to work with Intralinks because it is renowned for its work in highly regulated industries, where protecting data and valuable IP is critical,” continues Paul Sherrell, Head of Partnerships at Premiership Rugby.

Intralinks is a robust, yet simple, enterprise collaboration solution that gives demanding professionals the freedom to exchange, and work on documents on any device - wherever they are. With Intralinks you can sync, share and UNshare® files, work efficiently on group projects and use Information Rights Management (IRM) to watermark confidential files, managing content wherever it goes with the knowledge that your documents remain secure.

Sherrell says: “For example, if I am communicating with a partner’s user network in Thailand, some of whom request Premiership Rugby’s brand guidelines, specifications for LEDs and big screen adverts, I can create different workspaces in Intralinks. I can upload the necessary files into these workspaces and, depending on the sensitivity of the content, watermark the files and set a time limit for the existence of the document too. I will also, as administrator, decide which users are able to see and edit what, and I can fully audit the workspaces whenever I like. That way, we do not need to use email or courier on an ad-hoc basis as everything sits in one place.”

Following the deployment of Intralinks, the whole communication process with the partner network became extremely streamlined. The usability of Intralinks was also a bonus for Premiership Rugby: it is extremely easy to train users on how to create a workspace and permission users. “It was very important that our partners were happy with how we shared documents with them, and understood how to use Intralinks. I’ve had great feedback from external users,” says Sherrell.

Sherrell concludes: “It is extremely important that we secure our sensitive information when communicating with our sponsors. We take pride in working with best-of-breed partners and are delighted to start a relationship with Intralinks.”

A Team Game

“2015 is a massive year for rugby in England. Aviva Premiership Rugby has seen tremendous growth on and off the pitch and its brand reputation relies on its ability to nurture commercial relationships,” said Dave Wareham, SVP EMEA, Intralinks. “Premiership Rugby understands the importance of using technologies, such as Information Rights Management (IRM), to protect its confidential assets, and recognises that consumer-grade solutions can easily compromise everything it has worked towards as an organisation. We’re proud that it has selected Intralinks to support its document collaboration needs.”

About Intralinks

Intralinks® Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: IL) is a leading, global technology provider of secure enterprise content collaboration solutions. Through innovative Software-as-a-Service solutions, Intralinks solutions are designed to enable the exchange, control and management of information between organizations securely and compliantly when working through the firewall. More than 3.1 million professionals have depended on Intralinks’ experience. With a track record of enabling high-stakes transactions and business collaborations valued at more than $28.1 trillion, Intralinks is a trusted provider of easy-to-use, enterprise strength, cloud-based collaboration solutions.