In Depth

How you fund a CSO

Genzyme's CFO-An exec who gets it; Finding security equilibrium; Are our harbors safe?; Better budgeting; What employees who travel need from a CSO; Protecting your company's intellectual property; A true story of employee termination

By CSO Contributor

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In other words, if your company has a significant number of people traveling abroad, make sure your CSO has all the information he needs to protect employees from things that go bump on the road.

-Daintry DuffyThe Crime That Keeps on TakingINTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Your stuff gets taken without necessarily disappearing from the premises. The only way you figure out the crime has even occurred is that your competitive edge somehow vanishes into your arch rival's new product launch. The stolen advantage becomes a deficit that can last for a very long time.

It's the theft of intellectual property. "I call it the death of a thousand cuts," says William Boni, vice president and CISO of Motorola. "Because most organizations don't have a means for tracking the loss of proprietary information, they go on constantly hemorrhaging, losing market share. Gradually it takes the vitality out of the organization because it's hard to invent things faster than people are stealing it."

Dark forces are arrayed not just against the ones and zeroes of vital data assets, but against indiscreet conversations, improperly discarded documents, immodest descriptions of research breakthroughs offered up during presentations at conferences, and hiring processes rich with discoverable insight into areas of business growth. Protective strategieswhich often fall to security executives to developdepend on three things: identifying the assets most vital to the business; spreading awareness throughout the company of their importance; and pursuing ways to limit vulnerability to determined thieves.

Training rooted in enlightened self-interest plays a role, according to John Pontrelli, director of security at W.L. Gore & Associates. Pontrelli lets employees know how losing intellectual property hurts the company. "We rely on each other to protect our trade secrets. Maintaining the integrity of those secrets is the reason we are able to hand out bonus checks at the end of the year. So it affects everyone if something happens."

In 2000, W.L. Gore created an intellectual property committee aimed at ensuring that communication with the outside world was not too revealing. Says Pontrelli, "The litmus test for all of us is to ask: Would I know this information if I didn't work here? And would my biggest competitor want this information?"

The urgency of the protection mission is high, says James Chandler, president of the National Intellectual Property Law Institute. "If a company loses its assets, it could die. Intellectual property is what keeps a company viable."

-Sarah D. ScaletExit Strategies: A True StorySAFE TERMINATION

We never had any proof that Charlie was engaged in criminal activity, but nobody really wanted to know. It was bad enough when we discovered he had lied about his job history and his home address. Why nobody had checked him outwell, mistakes had been made. But as a highly paid consultant, I was called in to do the cleanup.