Writing Information Security Policies

Intellectual Property Issues

Regardless of who performs the development, the final result can be considered intellectual property. This intellectual property contains the business process and other proprietary information as to how the organization operates on a daily basis. These programs should be treated as valuable assets.

In the context of information security, gaining knowledge of this intellectual property can give an outsider a view of the internal workings of the organization. This knowledge can provide guides to actual or social engineering of the systems and the people using the systems. The result could be electronic break-ins or other computer security problems that could be masked by using this internal knowledge.

Most organizations ...