A succession of high profile, large scale data breaches have made cybersecurity a pressing concern for senior corporate leadership. The headlines in the popular press have focused on the risks that data breaches pose to ordinary consumers: identity theft, financial fraud, and loss of personal privacy. Data security is at least equally important, however, to protect a company’s own confidential commercial information and trade secrets, and the sensitive information that commercial partners and others entrust to the company’s safekeeping. The theft of such highly valuable commercial information can cause losses exceeding even the largest consumer data breaches.
Data security, however, can carry substantial costs for business. Apart from the direct investment in hardware and software and qualified IT security professionals, enhanced security can carry significant hidden costs by unintentionally impeding employee efficiency, mobility, collaboration and creativity. To balance the benefits and costs of data security, companies must ask “What is reasonable protection for sensitive commercial data?” That was the question posed to a panel at American Lawyer Media’s Seventh Annual IP Trademark, Copyright & Licensing Counsel Forum in New York.
