Tips on Protecting Your Trade Secrets

I found Keeping Your Rivals From Minding Your Business in The New York Times and realized I had a follow up to my post Trade Secrets: What Happens When Sending Secrets by E-mail. Among the article's suggestions that I think apply most to trade secrets issues:

HANG ON TO YOUR LAPTOP In a survey by RSA Security, 10 percent of the respondents acknowledged they had lost their laptops or cellphones at some point. An obvious remedy is to keep the computer with you, rather than leaving it in a hotel room or locked car.
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LOCK OUT OTHERS When it’s not possible or practical to keep physical possession of the computer, you can take a number of protective measures to ensure that only its owner has access. One of the simplest is to use the built-in fingerprint reader on your laptop, if it has one.
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ENCRYPT E-MAIL Individual e-mail messages that contain sensitive information like customer or financial data can be encrypted with security software. Unencrypted e-mail could be easily intercepted and read if sent over the Internet in ordinary text. The simplest way to encrypt e-mail is with a service like PGP Universal (which comes with various options and at a wide range of prices at pgp.com) or Voltage Security Network ($65 a person a year at voltage.com). Of course, recipients of your messages will need software that can decrypt what you’ve sent.

BLOCK OUTSIDERS Ensure secure access to an office network when you’re traveling with a virtual private network. This will prevent anyone from monitoring your communications and is particularly important when using a public network or otherwise sharing Internet access with strangers.

And the following could be said of trade secrets in general:

Granted, all these security measures require some work. “Until you see the light and the need for these products, such as with a stolen laptop or lost data, no one else is going to be able to motivate you to use them,” says Sean Steele, a data security consultant from InfoLock Technologies in Arlington, Va. “A single data breach could easily cost several orders of magnitude more than any of these solutions.”