Overview

Developing medicines for human and animal health requires global collaboration between researchers, clinicians, laboratories, others. Merck, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies, created enterprise-wide EngageZone service to provide a secure and highly compartmentalized collaborative work environment for company and worldwide business partners to exchange documents and to facilitate communications without compromising intellectual property or network security. EngageZone is a single point of entry allowing Merck and external partners to safely share documents of any size, participate in discussions, contribute ideas, view meetings; connect with others. Partners signing into EngageZone have controlled access and visibility to all their collaborations in one place, regardless of business units they work with. EngageZone is based on biopharmaceutical industry’s SAFE-BioPharma global identity and access management standard, which assures the cyber-identity of each participant may be trusted to represent the true identity of that individual. This lets Merck focus on access and application enablement rather than on credentialing users. EngageZone is used to leverage big data analytics, proprietary applications, and multiple databases from access points anywhere in the world. Since inception, 1,400 partners have shared almost 1,179,000 documents. Among the EngageZone safety features: Single sign-on and access; Multi-factor authentication; End-to-end encryption (at-rest and in-transit); Multiple levels of access based on security provisioning; User/role management and workflow, supporting scenarios where privileges change from project-to-project without sacrificing information security or user productivity; File sharing and document management to share, review, edit and update documents while maintaining version control.
EngageZone was jointly developed by Merck and Exostar, utilizing Exostar’s SAFE-BioPharma certified Identity and Access Management Solution and control audit framework.