Recent studies estimate that trade secrets may account for up to two-thirds of most companies’ information portfolios, and that the annual cost of trade secret misappropriation to U.S. companies ranges between $45 billion and $300 billion. Given the importance of trade secrets to many companies’ competitive success, it is no surprise that trade secret litigation is booming. Indeed, federal courts have seen it doubling roughly every decade for the past 30 years, and jury verdicts in the hundreds of millions are becoming almost commonplace.

Not long ago, many companies’ trade secret protection policies consisted of erecting physical barriers preventing unauthorized access to information typically maintained in hard-copy form, and in limiting employee access to the most sensitive information on a need-to-know basis. While such measures are still important, in today’s digital world, where an ever-increasing amount of trade secret and commercially sensitive information is maintained in electronic form, these policies are dangerously outdated. Growing reliance on cloud computing—broadly defined as providing services or information over a digital network (typically the Internet)—has led to greater opportunities for trade secret theft as more and more businesses store such information in the cloud. Today, companies must balance promoting easy and remote access to information, enabling a diverse workforce spread across geographies to innovate and cooperate, with protecting the intellectual property that drives their businesses.

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