Most organisations sign non-disclosure agreements
(“NDA”) as a matter of routine. They
are often treated as preliminary documents exchanged at the start
of a commercial discussion, reviewed lightly and executed quickly.
However, in a cloud-based and artificial- intelligence-driven
environment, the standard NDA is no longer administrative
boilerplate. It is a core data governance instrument. A typical NDA
would usually include a clause as follows: “Upon
termination, the receiving party shall return or destroy the
disclosing party's confidential information”.
Traditionally, confidential information lived in filing
cabinets, local servers or email inboxes, and it assumed that data
existed in a single location and that deletion was immediate and
absolute. That assumption is no longer legally or technically
accurate.
