What Information Is Secret?

Some employers have a hard time knowing what they should consider secret. It's hard to control employees' access to information and equipment until you know what you're trying to protect.

In deciding what's confidential about your business, look at:

• the extent to which the information is known outside the business
• the extent to which the information is known by employees and others involved in the business
• the value of the information to the business and its competitors
• the amount of effort or money expended by the business in developing the information
• the ease or difficulty with which the information could be properly acquired or duplicated by others

Customer and client information. Another type of information that you may want to protect is sensitive customer or client information. In certain industries and professions, your employees may become privy to information that you and your customers or clients would not want to be made public. If this is true for your business, you may want to consider a confidentiality policy to protect it.

Once you have an idea of what you want to protect, if anything, you can better devise a strategy for how to protect confidential information.