I am building a new private network in our office and wanted to know if there is any reason I should you a separate patch panel or is it safe to use the existing panel that already has a company network switch attached to it. If they are two completely independent networks could there be any data transfer between the two or would they be safe from each other.
By definition, if they are two completely independent networks, then there won't be any data being transferred between them.
Hard to give any good advice without knowing more about the situation. Having a separate panel can make things clearer however and stop someone coming along later and accidentally connecting up the networks. Good labelling is important.
To confirm that the patch panels are entirely independent, you would need to track and trace each port.
If you do use the same panel for disparate networks, it wouldn't take much for someone to "accidently" join them up!