August 5, 2019

What is document security?

By Lee Bourke

Why is it important?

We use many different methods to protect the things in our lives that are important to us. We use banks to protect our money, insurance plans to protect our physical assets and various systems to protect ourselves. Your company’s documents are a critical component to accomplishing your mission and achieving your goals. Your long-term success is dependent upon your ability to protect and manage these assets. Effectively securing your documents provides protection from unauthorised access and the associated risks. In our ever changing technology based world it is imperative to have control over all of your documents in order to maintain control of your organisation and your future.

What are the challenges securing paper documents?

Paper documents are inherently difficult to manage and particularly hard to secure. Other than locking file rooms or storage devices there simply aren’t a lot of options when it comes to securing paper documents. Some Document Management systems provide some level of document security by requiring that paper files be checked out by reading a file ID barcode and identifying the user requesting the file. These systems, are diligently used to prevent unauthorised user from gaining access to files they shouldn’t have. The problem is these files and documents are still at risk for unauthorised use, they can be lost, and there is not a good way of tracking who had access to which documents.

Challenges include

  • Difficultly in editing and updating documents
  • Lost or misplaced documents
  • Access limitations due to location of documents
  • The time and cost of filing and searching for documents
  • Easily accessed by unauthorised users

Advantages of document management systems:

Implementing a Document Management Solution provide inherent security and control of your critical documents and information. With a Document Management Solution all of your disparate documents are stored electronically in a single system. Within the system files and documents are organised according to application types (such as Invoices, Human Resources, Medical Records, Contracts, etc.) and within the applications they are organised into logical files and file sections. Each of the levels can have access rights applied to them. This ensures that the only authorised users have access to these documents. These Document Management systems also allow you to organise users into groups and to provide different functionality rights to these groups. As and example one group might be able to access certain documents and to print and/or make changes to them, while another group might have more restrictive rights and only be able to see a subset of those same records and only have right to view them. Document Management Solutions provide the type of security and access tracking that you need to successfully develop and implement a document security strategy.

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