The informational security of any company must become one of the leading concerns of its business strategy. The company's chances to cope with external threats largely depend on the level of such security.
Maintaining a secrecy regime is very important. If the employee’s activity involves access to important information for the company, possibly even secret, then, an agreement on confidentiality and non-disclosure of information must certainly be signed. This document provides a relative guarantee of safety of important information for the company.
Such a “blow” in the form of the leak of important information can happen “from behind” - a former or actual employee may become the cause of the leak of strategically important information. Here are some practical recommendations on the formation or optimization of a company's information security system.
The participants in the process of working with confidential information are:
- The information owner - as a rule, it is the company itself.
- The information keeper - the person responsible not only for the storage of information, but also for its administration and transmission;
- The user - the employees who directly work with the information.
In order to guarantee the full explanation of the rules concerning confidential information of the company, it is necessary to:
1) officially familiarize the employee with the regulations on commercial secrets of the company;
2) conclude an agreement with the employee on non-disclosure of the company’s trade secrets;
Still, it is not enough just to declare the information a secret and draw up a non-disclosure agreement. This process requires a complex of legal measures. It is achieved by the adoption of one or more local regulations aimed at preserving information whose leakage can lead to serious damage.
The first thing to do is to develop and approve a regulation on trade secrets or a regulation on confidential information. No matter the name of the document, it should be adopted with the aim of protecting important corporate information from leakage. It should include:
- a list of information classified as a trade secret;
- a list of confidential information (if, according to the law, the information cannot be classified as a trade secret);
- the determination of the boundaries of the use of information by employees;
- an indication of the mandatory warning of employees about the non-disclosure of protected information at the stage of hiring.
If the company maintains a trade secret regime for its information, it will be much more convenient for it to keep it via the efforts of the relevant employees. It is advisable to organize a separate unit engaged in the protection of information. Its employees should undergo proper training to effectively protect professionally important information for the company.
There are some risks concerning these agreements. Nowadays, some companies prefer to sign non-disclosure agreements with all new employees. This group may have concerns that their passport data could fall into the wrong hands and be used for criminal purposes. The danger mostly resides not in the signing of such an agreement, but in various violations concerning this process.
All in all, a non-disclosure agreement is the best way to protect your company from employees who might try to sell or use the insights they gained while working for you. The intellectual property you possess is not something to be given away fast and easy. That’s why, if you haven’t already formulated such a document, now is the perfect time to do it!
After weighing all the pros and cons, we can surely advise you to get on with this process, because a confidentiality agreement is much more beneficial than it is risky.
