It’s gotta be the shoes! Or is it? The gold is in the data.

What do you think is the key to a successful sports team?  The shoes?  The favorite sports drink?  Player salaries?  Complaining about the referees?  No – it’s athlete data and analysis. Athlete data analytics is a hot topic in sports that offers a competitive advantage in more ways than one.  It holds great value for any team and for its competitors.  Typically stored in a database and accessed via a proprietary analytics engine, this requires unique data and code protection planning, and is the reason C Sharp Sports teamed up with NetLib Security for protecting, managing, and defending the new holy grail on and off the field.

From professional leagues to smaller, amateur clubs, C Sharp Sports, an information management system provider for the sports industry, is a new player on the scene.  Their goal is to help organizations manage and protect what could be as much a goldmine for the club’s competitors as for the team, like stealing the opponent’s playbook.  Through a suite of applications, C Sharp Sports offers clubs the ability to easily access and leverage that data in a variety of ways, including training, performance monitoring, or tracking personal and financial information. 

This 360 degree view of each athlete provides a truly competitive edge to help keep their players in good “health”, be it physical or financial, ensuring the highest levels of performance on the field.  C Sharp Sports not only distinguishes itself from competitors as an Information Management System, but it has become The Learning Platform for Sports as well.

Clubs, trainers and volunteers all receive access to an extensive library filled with exercises, a Players Monitoring Module, a state of the art Video analysis tool and, through a partnership with AION Sports, a Virtual Reality application that is part of the package for sports clubs as well.

Given all the data they are collecting, including Personal Health Information (PHI), and with full deployment planned for 2019, it became imperative for C Sharp Sports to find a solution to protect sensitive team data, as well as protecting their own intellectual property from C Sharp Sports competitors.  Previously, the company had utilized other solutions, but they did not find any vendor who was able to meet the multitude of their needs and that could be deployed quickly and with ease.  Making a simple code change could take a week of valuable time.  Initially, C Sharp Sports looked at Microsoft’s Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) solution, but found it to be prohibitively expensive.  Nor was it easy to roll out for a distributed application, or capable of providing all the safeguards they needed.  Ultimately, their search led them to NetLib Security, whose powerful data encryption solution, Encryptionizer, effectively and efficiently locks down the data with a flexible and scalable architecture; in turn helping C Sharp Sports scale to meet their growing business needs and that of its customers.

“It is good to have a partner such as Netlib Security on whom you can depend regarding the encryption and security of your most valuable assets, namely your Intellectual Property,” said Rufus van Gom, CTO Interstellar Sports, parent company of C Sharp Sports.

The results have been beneficial to both companies.  Today, NetLib Security protects their databases and program code.  One critical advantage C Sharp Sports has gained has been time: for example, the complete elimination of that aforementioned week for a code change, since Encryptionizer requires no application changes.  Indeed, the company now saves one to two weeks on delivery, allowing for more rapid deployment.  Furthermore, encryption has become a valuable part of C Sharp Sports’ unique offering to prospective clients.  Encrypting athlete data—the customers’ essential IP—is a high priority among their customers, and C Sharp Sports offers what they need.

Currently, C Sharp Sports does business in many regions across the globe. They are also in talks with Qatar to utilize their platform for the FIFA World Cup in 2022.  With their business on an upward trajectory, C Sharp Sports is fully equipped to be the next MVP for sports organizations everywhere. 

For over 20 years, NetLib Security has been a leader in cost-effective data encryption solutions that can be easily deployed in a few steps to satisfy a pressing need quickly, and with confidence. The company’s flagship product, Encryptionizer, encrypts stored data right out of the box, with virtually no impact on performance and directly assists with compliance requirements. NetLib Security solutions are ideally suited to the small to mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) with constrained IT departments who need to protect stored data on their Windows servers and connected devices.