Remote work, 10 recommendations to secure your company’s secrets

As companies have transited to remote work due to the Covid-19 pandemic, future workplace scenarios are still unclear. However, the safeguard of trade secrets is a key point to take into account. Four experts – Shannon Murphy partner at Winston & Strawn, Mark Clews and Luke Tenery, senior managing directors at Ankura and John Stark, a managing director at Ankura – have written a commentary on this topic for Law.com.

We summarize their ten recommendation companies should follow:

1. Companies should deploy a learning trade-secret training program, and not just a cursory section in employee on-boarding.

2. Technical controls should be used to limit access to information on a need-to-know basis and should be audited periodically.

3. Employees should be reminded of their obligations and companies should require a re-affirmation of employee compliance.

4. As for free cloud-based storage or collaboration tools, companies should have policies and training on the use of free platforms, restrict unapproved programs on corporate devices.

5. As for video-conferencing, employees should be educated to regularly change meeting passwords and activating waiting rooms.

6. Companies need to clearly articulate protocols for third-party sharing.

7. Companies should have security policies with minimum requirements for employees’ personal devices and Wi-Fi settings.

8. Companies should review “clean desk” policies and bolster them to apply to remote-work scenarios, including discouraging printing trade-secret documents and providing istructions fro destruction.

9. Companies should prepare a plan, in concert with HR, IT, and business managers, to ensure prompt collection and termination of access, ideally before any termination occurs.

10. Companies should use monitoring technologies to flag, in real time, behavior that violates established rules and detect cyber threats.