Nordic Group

"The most important thing for me is peace of mind. I don't have to worry if we have a system in place that's sufficient to protect our data. Intralinks is an exemplary partner."

– Ian McGuinness, Project Manager BV 

The Company

Nordic Group and its subsidiaries enable pharmaceutical companies to develop, license, and manufacture medicinal products. Nordic Group and its subsidiaries offer quality assurance, regulatory compliance, and other services to its clients. The Nordic Group B.V. family is the preferred industrial partner to more than 100 European generic pharma companies.

The Situation

To manufacture their own versions of established drugs, some companies use Nordic Group and its subsidiaries intellectual property (IP), along with its related services. These clients need access to Nordic Group's confidential documents, which contain proprietary data. Sharing such sensitive content is innately risky.

“Drug development is not a cheap process,” says Ian McGuinness, a Nordic Group project manager. “We spend a lot of money and time getting the products finalized and registered. Your biggest fear is data theft — because a competitor could take the information and manufacture the drugs without the cost and time burden.”

To safely share data outside its own network, Nordic Group relied on an internally managed file sync and share (FSS) system. To satisfy the level of protection needed for highly confidential data Nordic Group’s managers decided they needed a safer and more robust FSS solution. It would offer complete control over shared documents and data. But the new FSS system would also simplify and streamline the document sharing process, and support operational improvements —without burdening internal information technology resources.

The Solution

Nordic Group selected Intralinks VIA as its enterprise FSS platform. The Intralinks Platform offers powerful security and privacy enabling technologies, including advanced information rights management (IRM). VIA enables the secure sharing of structured and ad hoc content between companies.

“VIA gives us a one-stop approach to how we share information,” as McGuinness explains. “It’s easy to use and straightforward, but it gives us the capability to control the data.”

Additionally, Intralinks has successfully supported many enterprise companies already. “We wanted a high-end data sharing room that provides complete data protection,” McGuinness says. “It’s all about assuring the clients we can provide a high-quality product for them.”

The Benefits

Automating and streamlining the file-sharing processes have boosted productivity. For instance, any given Nordic Group IP dossier can contain hundreds of documents and gigabytes of data. Previously, it took at least eight hours to jointly review a drug dossier with a client and select the pertinent files to share.

Now the files are electronically selected and uploaded to Intralinks VIA, where they are accessible to authorized third parties. The simplicity of the new selection and permissions process is much faster than before. “VIA reduced the required client file review time by 80 percent, easily,” claims McGuinness.

One of VIA’s most useful features is the ability to assign access privileges to an individual through a specific email address. Previously, Nordic Group had to grant access to complete client workgroups. Nordic Group managers can share a file — and then later revoke access to it, as needed. This applies even if the file is already outside of the Nordic Group network. Additionally, Nordic Group users can unshare content automatically by setting a deadline.

The Intralinks platform is also always available, without downtime. And there are no limits to the size of the files and documents VIA can share. A provider such as Intralinks inspires confidence.