Intellectual property is an essential component in any company, whether it’s the secrets to trade, patents, or just regular SOPs. This unique significance of intellectual property puts them at risk of copy, cyber-attacks, or theft attempts as well. Often intellectual assets carry more sensitive and much valuable information as compared to the physical ones. So as a company, you should be extra cautious and aggressive in securing this segment.
Protecting intellectual property is a complicated task and puts extra responsibility on human resources and IT departments. However, the biggest question you may be wondering about is how to secure your intellectual property. We have a few tips below to get you started.
Be Aware of Your Intellectual Property
This is one of the most essential and fundamental things that you need to understand. If you are not aware of the intellectual property that you have in your company then protecting it would be indeed impossible either. To make this task more efficient, you should consider making your employees aware of the intellectual property, its significance, and emphasize the protective measures.
Your employees should understand who they should be to protect the intellectual assets and how to protect them adequately. For this, the CSOs must play their role responsibly and should keep consistent communication with executives overseeing the intellectual assets. The company executives should also be meeting regularly to discuss any possible breaches and pre-plan or review the protective measures for the intellectual property.
Be Well-Aware of Where the Intellectual Capital Is
Often, companies and administration are not even fully aware of the location of their intellectual property. The first thing you have to do is be mindful of where it is to keep it safe. Usually, companies assume the intellectual capital to be on their servers (IT systems) and spend a lot of time and money trying to keep it secure. However, there are other sneakier locations like file-sharing services or cloud applications, personal drives of your staff members, printers, fax machines, scanners, and other third-party systems.
To adequately protect intellectual assets, you should have dedicated policies and regulations to use all company resources. Monitoring the cloud applications being used by your employees would also be a good step because your company can block an unwarranted application. The most important thing is to empower your employees and understand how to secure intellectual assets properly.
Make it Your Priority
You must be making the protection of intellectual assets a priority for your company’s sake because without this, you may be the last person to know that your company has lost it all. The copyright attorneys at CamutiLaw.com recommend conducting a thorough cost-benefit and risk analysis for the intellectual capital. You should have a detailed draft of all the assets that your company has and assess the risk if they are compromised. Once you figure this out, you would better spend your time protecting the assets that matter most to your organization.
Label the Most Important Ones as Yours
It should come as an obvious step because if something is so potent for your organization and has confidential intel, you should always label it. It can be just as simple as putting up a small note. Companies tend to overlook it sometimes because this step seems quite simplistic, and organizations may appraise it as not an important one. However, in the case of intellectual property theft, this is the step that would help you prove to the court that the stolen asset was yours and you had it labeled and well communicated.
Having it Secured All-Around
Your intellectual property is essential and must be secured dually, digitally, and physically. Ensure that the rooms with the servers or drives with the company’s information assets are locked well and log the critical holders for that room. You should also have passwords and limited employee access to these vital archives. These added restrictions and extra caution may seem like an unnecessary nuisance but they save you from many issues related to informational breaches in the long run. It would also make tracing a breech a lot easier. So, keep the security measures tighter when it comes to protecting intellectual property.
One of the best ways to keep the intellectual capital well-secured is to imagine what you would be doing if you wanted to acquire that information. Once you pinpoint the flaws in your security system, you should be able to improve the security system better. With the suggestions mentioned above, you should be well on your way to secure your company’s intellectual assets.