While we’ve all seen how quickly life has changed during the pandemic, from a business and HR angle the possibility of intellectual property misappropriation and theft occasioned by work-from-home policies may not yet be clear to many. With many employees working outside their company’s normal IT security fence, their increased use of their own computers and devices instead of those in their offices with standard or enhanced security mechanisms has made it more challenging for employers to control access to key business information.

In the rush to set up a fully or partially remote workforce, most companies had little time to establish work-from-home guidelines on protection of their valuable intangible assets like trade secrets and confidential business information. Most employers would likely have sufficient internal guidelines on copying files to USB drives, emailing files to personal accounts, and uploading to cloud storages like Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive, but who could have imagined the need for rules precluding sharing proprietary information over Zoom, Skype, Webex, House Party, Ring Central, or Microsoft Teams?

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