Welcome to The Big Think – the thought leadership series from Allen & Overy’s global Employment practice.

Its mission is to think big, think forward and think without boundaries. Members of our international team put their heads together to think about the issues that ought to be on your agenda, from both a domestic and a global perspective. We tackle all the different aspects of the issue under consideration which are likely to pose both the biggest opportunities and problems for HR practitioners and in-house counsel.

In this edition we focus on the employment aspects of cybersecurity and ask: what can employers do to build truly secure cyber defences? Are they putting the right resources into training and educating their workforces or relying too much on technology to thwart attacks? Is it possible to pre-screen potential recruits or monitor the activity of existing employees without falling foul of fast-changing privacy and data protection laws? What policies and contractual obligations can be legitimately placed on workers? How can companies plan for the public firestorm unleashed when employee or customer data is compromised?