You got to hide your trade secrets away

With apologies to The Beatles, here is a story via The Trade Secrets Blog:

Biggest Threat to Corporate Information: Ignorance

Feb 14 2007

By Andrea James --The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Corporate executives listen up: Valuable company information is getting into the wrong hands. Sensitive documents are walking out in briefcases, bytes of data are zooming away over the Internet, and those internal files you thought were history are probably lying, unshredded, in some Dumpster.

"You are losing tons of information on a daily basis and don't know it," Dan Verton, executive editor of Homeland Defense Journal, said Tuesday. "A lot of companies ... they want to bury their heads in the sand, they want to ignore it. Shareholder value is the rule of the day."

Big companies may be able to hide these losses because of their size. Small and medium sized businesses do not have the luxury of padding found in the big companies. Can your company afford to lose any of the trade secrets which give you the edge over your competition?

Here is another prime bit from the article:

Making new hires sign acceptable use policies won't cut it, panelists said. People don't read them, or they don't care because rules usually are not enforced.

New college graduates are savvy enough to find ways around controls and Web mail blockers, the panelists said. That's why it's important to train employees to be careful.

"These are people you are going to be hiring," Verton said. "They don't have the same understanding of acceptable use."

If you have read my prior posts on trade secrets, I really suggest that you do so.