Erasmus famously once said “Prevention is better than cure”, a well-known fact in business and medicine, especially when it comes to protecting the valuable information on which your business relies. This could be: a complex scientific formula; sensitive pricing information; or customer and supply lists.
The threat might come from a departing employee or former owner of the business. Either way, having robust policies and paperwork in place will protect your business and act as a deterrent to prevent the threat before it can occur. If not, they will assist in persuading a judge to help you protect your business by court order.
The “Prevention”
Here are nine tips to help prevent theft of critical information in your business:
- Limit access to confidential information to select individuals who really need it.
- Make it clear that the information is regarded by the business as confidential.
- Know where business critical information is kept: on what systems and in which applications.
- Ensure data management and confidential information policies are robust and widely disseminated across the workforce. Review regularly.
- Implement regular detection measures to uncover unauthorised access or unusual transfer or copying of information.
- Disable access to commonly used cloud storage applications such as Dropbox and Google Drive.
- Spot check employees who are serving their notice period and their company owned devices and accounts whilst still employed and conduct a final day review before they leave your premises.
- Ensure employees are restricted from misusing confidential information if they leave their business. Post termination restrictions in employment contracts must be tailored to the employee rather than “a one size fits all” approach. Limited employee-specific restrictions are much more likely to be supported by a judge.
- Ensure fellow partners and shareholders have similar restrictions in their agreements if they leave. In general, these can be more onerous than those imposed on employees to reflect the position that they receive part of the business’s value when they sell their partnership share or shares.
The “Cure”
No matter how robust your policies and procedures, the risk of information being leaked or stolen is never zero. Should an incident occur, here are some tips to help contain the breach, receive justice for the crime, and stop it from happening again:
- Identify the information misused and tighten up existing restrictions within the business.
- Speed is key – confidential information can lose is very confidentiality once it is in the public domain.
- Pursue the new employer or business if they ought reasonably to have known the information being brought across was likely to be confidential. The travel company Trailfinders did just that in 2021.
- Consider contacting the police – there may be potential criminal liability under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 or the Copyright and Rights and Databases Regulations 1997.
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