Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has introduced a secure document management sharing system to prevent drug research falling into the wrong hands.

The company, which last year invested $3.8bn (£2.1bn) in drug research and development, will use the technology to securely share information with third- party research labs, universities and biotechnology firms.

The Inter-Business Vault product from security firm Cyber-Ark transports data in a protected package that includes a firewall, authentication, access control and data encryption.

‘We needed a secure way to share documents with our business partners,’ said Patrick Meehan, lead technical architect at AstraZeneca. ‘We can exchange data and documents more quickly with our business partners.’

Security managers at AstraZeneca will use the system to create specific access rights for users. The system is also providing version controls so data cannot be tampered with.

‘It has proven very easy to deploy and maintain. There is no need to tweak any code,’ said Meehan.

The system, which is accessible over the internet, replaces a virtual private network that required greater IT administration and helpdesk support.

‘We were always getting helpdesk calls about it. Either it did not work, we had to constantly adjust firewall settings, or similar annoying issues,’ said Meehan.

With hundreds of businesses, organisations and 11,900 AstraZeneca employees involved in the research and development process, the company also needed to ensure that set-up costs were kept to a minimum.