What is digital escrow? IP escrow? Cloud escrow and data escrow?

Digital escrow is the generic term and describes the deposit of digital assets. In practice, six assets are currently placed in escrow: software, cloud, key, IP, data and artificial intelligence (AI and neural networks). In the past, the term technology escrow was sometimes used instead of digital escrow.

Classic software escrow (today sometimes also called on-premise escrow) describes the original use case of escrow: it resolves the conflict of interest between a software manufacturer (who wants to protect their know-how = their software source code, but at the same time also sell their software on the market). IP escrow is also called know-how escrow. Examples of IP Escrow can be the deposit of chemical processes, construction plans including parts lists and concrete names of suppliers, or technical documents of machines (possibly encluding embedded software) or plants such as wind turbines.

Cloud escrow is a further development of the classic escrow and allows to effectively secure cloud software (e.g. a SaaS service) by means of an escrow. In this context – but also beyond, independent of the cloud – data escrow is playing an increasingly important role, in which large amounts of structured or unstructured data are deposited by one party, which another party is only allowed to view upon the occurrence of firmly defined conditions (or which Deposix analyses and evaluates on behalf of one party for another).