Mikele Bicolli
Apr 6, 2022

Basic Measures to Protect Trade Secrets

You have to meet three conditions in order to achieve trade secret status, protect the information from being disclosed, the secret must have economic value, and the trade secret must remain known to a limited group of people. Provided that your information becomes a trade secret, the measures that you can take to protect it generally fall under three categories:

Physical – The trade secret information is often stored in hard copies and in that case, there are several ways to keep them safe. Many companies use vaults while others limit the accesses in several areas of the company building making sure only people who are authorized and need can access the information.
Digital – There are many cases when the trade secret is stored in a digital form so there are other measures to be considered in order to provide protection. Data encryption, usage of passwords as well as software which monitor and restrict the access from users are some good steps into achieving digital protection.
Legal – There are always going to be people and, in some cases, other companies that will need access to the trade secret. In this case legal measures are needed such as the NDAs, confidentiality agreements, non-compete agreements etc.

What would you add to this list to ensure further a trade secret?