Engineers,

In the recent era of digitization, the potential for security breaches has grown manifold.  Most businesses have several security measures in place like firewalls, anti-malware software, and many others to prohibit the infiltration of their IT infrastructure by intruders, but they have ignored the possibility of internal security breaches, particularly breaches related to document security.

According to a survey carried out by the Ponemon Institute, an independent research firm, 90 percent of the respondent organizations based in the U.S. experienced leakage of confidential documents during the 12 months before the survey. A further, 59 percent revealed their controls are not effective enough at monitoring employees. In another survey conducted by ComputerScope and Ricoh, 85 percent of the respondents in Ireland admit security implications are one of their major IT concerns.

This shows that document security is an important concern. Regardless of format, whether analog or digital, business data and proprietary information needs to be secured in order to safeguard the interests of the business. This article explains why document security should not be ignored.

So, let’s start.

Restricts Unauthorized Access

According to a recent audit done at California Pacific Medical Center, an internal employee with CPMC accessed the records of 844 patients between October 2013 and October 2014 without any official purpose or authorization. The information types accessed vary among patient demographics, the last four digits of Social Security numbers, and clinical information.

That’s a troubling number. CPMC is not the only organization that faced such a breach. Many similar examples across several industries have been reported recently, such as the AT&T customer data breach and the BBC Investigation breach.

These are perfect examples to understand why document security is highly important for any business. However, with document security software that provides a user-based access system, businesses can easily avoid these breaches. Documents can be locked to specific users and to their devices, restrictions on sharing and distribution can be enabled, and moreover, location-based access can be allowed or prevented.

Prevents Duplication and Unauthorized Sharing

Last year the Australian immigration department faced a major data breach when one of its employees copied and pasted a chart from MS Excel into a Word document, which led to the leakage of information of more than 9,000 asylum seekers.  Although the reason stated was accidental, that doesn’t change the impact.

Implementing copy-protection software can easily nullify such occurrences.  In addition to preventing data from being copied, it can prohibit unauthorized document sharing and piracy.  Document security software can also provide functionality such as an expire and revoke document feature, enabling a business to set an expiration date for a document or revoke it at any stage irrespective of the file location.

Offers Better Control

Having a document security software solution not only ensures better security, but it also offers better control of monitoring.  We’ve already discussed user-access authorization, and along with that, document security software provides an opportunity to set usage instructions such as the number of times an authorized user is permitted to print documents. It can also enable you to change access controls even after distribution.

Another advantage it offers is the ability to oversee all types of users within an organization.  Even when documents are 100 percent secure from inappropriate employee use or access (acess control), the data is still vulnerable to employees in controlling positions like database administrators and system managers.  Document security software can help with this by providing an audit log that stores all the information regarding whether someone tried tampering with the data, making unauthorized changes, who used it, and other vital information.

So, when do you plan to implement document security in your organization?  Are there any other points you would like to add?  Please feel free to share your comments and thanks for reading!