Four Critical Limitations of Existing Technical Data Export Compliance Solutions

Compliance solutions for protecting export-controlled goods and hardware from unauthorized export have been in place for over a decade now with the evolution of various Global Trade Management and Shipping solutions available in the marketplace. However, solutions to handle technology or technical data have only been emerging over the last few years. Unfortunately, the currently available solutions are typified by four critical limitations that prevent them from achieving optimally compliant protection of export-controlled technical data.

1. Over-permissive and reactive

Several solutions do not protect technical data at the point of data access or transfer and may either water-mark the data or record the event for future auditing. But violations leak through on a daily basis under these systems, so export compliance and the national/global security intent is undermined.

2. Too cumbersome to implement

This happens when complicated classification schemes are put in place, and minimal automation exists to assist in the classification of thousands – even millions – of an organizations’ documents and data. Only compliance officers and specialized technical personnel know the details of how to classify the documents; but those same people are already over-stretched with their current responsibilities.

3. Impossible to execute or maintain

Solutions that put workflows into place to have compliance officers manually approve technical data transfers are too slow and impossible to execute on a large scale. Further, manually created data classification schemes create maintenance difficulties, for ITAR and EAR regulations are constantly in flux, especially with current export control reforms environment. Additionally, companies are introducing new partners (suppliers/customers), new human resources (employees/contractors), and new products on a regular basis, which forces technical data management schemes to be updated on a regular basis. This presents a completely infeasible management issue for organizations.

4. Over-restrictive and business-impeding

Various solutions make very broad-brushed decisions on export control, either eliminating or severely slowing down the possibility of the most common scenarios of global collaboration. These collaborations are both necessary in today’s marketplace, and often allowed collaborations under ITAR/EAR without a license or under a license that is already in place for an organization. Hence, companies cannot engage in their regular business. This ultimately results in a “false sense of security”.