Obtain Authority by Means of a Proprietary Software Package. For a large company in a highly competitive industry, it may be practical to develop a proprietary software package that provides need-to-know authorization. Such a database stores employee names and access privileges to classified information. Users would not be able to look up each individual's access rights, but instead would enter the requester's name, and the identifier associated with the information being sought. The software then provides a response indicating whether or not the employee is authorized to access such information. This alternative avoids the danger of creating a list of personnel with respective access rights to valuable, critical, or sensitive information that could be stolen.