Cognizant’s filing listed some of the trade secret information disclosed to Infosys: “workflows and functionality implemented by the proprietary software; source materials relating to the proprietary software, including the source code, technical documentation, product release notes, link libraries, and development toolkits; test cases for testing the proprietary software; interfaces, connectors and adaptors for the proprietary software, as well as tools for creating such interfaces, connectors, and adaptors; the database, database schema, file structures, data dictionaries and other information relating to the storage of data by the proprietary software.”
For CIOs, the case raises questions about how far a contract, which is all that NDAs and NDAAs are, will protect a company when sensitive data is being shared with a potential rival.
Interestingly enough, the typical element of an NDA violation is not at issue here. There is no accusation that Infosys officials shared the sensitive data with anyone outside their company. Rather, the complaint alleges that they misused the information.
