Broadcasting our professional lives continues to be all the rage – we just move from social media platform to social media platform in order to do it.
Notice how the Mike Tyson vs Roy Jones Junior exhibition boxing match was sponsored by Triller? What the hell is Triller is a question many people were asking – well Triller is the USA’s latest push to dominate the space captured by TikTok. Yup, yet more social media – apparently us humans need that in our lives.
For most corporations, trade secrets and their proprietary technology are their biggest competitive advantage. However, these advantages are vulnerable to exploitation by various types of corporate spies using what’s known as industrial espionage. Even though it is illegal, industrial espionage has become a great threat to global firms. This makes it critical for companies to take various steps in order to protect their vital information. It is important for firms and businesses to adopt some defences to protect themselves from corporate as well as industrial espionage. No wonder the term industrial shredders gets such a lot of searches on Google nowadays.
- Identify your company’s secrets
The first and the most important step to protect your business from corporate espionage is to identify your trade secrets. A lot of firms are unable to deduce the importance of their trade secrets. But it is extremely important to evaluate your intellectual property and establish your priorities while allocating security for the protection of your trade secrets.
- Identify your biggest threats
Before developing strategies to counter industrial espionage it is important to understand the threats that you are facing. For instance, most of the people think that their competitors are the biggest and the most obvious danger. However, it is important to keep in mind that visitors, business partners, activist groups, and even foreign governments can be potential threats to your trade secrets. Thus it is important to consider all of these threats before developing any counterespionage strategy.
- Ensure proper physical security
It is important to protect your business from industrial spies. The business companies and firms should ensure that their office infrastructure and all of the equipment is secured from all physical threats. This essentially includes setting up of good surveillance systems such as the installation of security cameras and securing of various entry points. It is also advisable to hire specialised personnel for security. Shredder machine use should be weekly or even daily avoid any disclosure of information through your paperwork.
- Set up policies for control of information
Setting policies for the control of unwanted disclosure of secrets and corporate and financial issues is an important step to protect yourself from corporate espionage. You need to establish certain policies and rules regarding the flow of information. The employees need to follow some basic rules about what information can be shared outside and inside the workplace. Certain rules and procedures need to be established for the control as well as storage of sensitive data. In addition to this corporate firms should also develop proper procedures for the disposal of various paper documents and other sensitive equipment.
- Try to compartmentalise sensitive information
Last but not least it is important to compartmentalise the sensitive information and trade secrets of your company. It is not necessary for every employee of your company to have each and every information. Not only employees but also senior members of your corporation do not need to know each and every technical detail about your operations for staff it is important to put some policies and segregate the employees on the basis of information they can access. This will help you to avoid complete disclosure of all your trade secrets in case any employee turns up against your company which happens way too frequently.