Despite the increasing sophistication of technology, there's no magic bullet for protecting IP. An effective protection program must include a number of strategies, including educating employees, contractors and partners about what constitutes trade secrets; establishing the right governance model (policies, roles and responsibilities, enforcement); process-level controls and procedural, physical and technical controls to minimize risk to a level acceptable by management.

The first step to protecting your trade secrets is to identify them through interviews with the business process owners and document them. Next, estimate how much these trade secrets are worth. Although this is just a snapshot that will change over time, it's essential for building a business case to obtain the funding to put protections in place. Having this valuation is also important should a theft actually occur. "It's a complicated process to do this, but a critical element for prosecutors," says the FBI's Schadler. Then, rank the trade secrets according to their value as well as the threats, vulnerabilities and resulting risk.

A comprehensive education and awareness program is a critical step; some experts argue that it's the most important one. Finally, your company should define programmatic, compliance and operational metrics to measure the performance of your trade secret protections against key indicators. Without the metrics, you will not know whether you are effectively protecting your trade secrets.