How Digitization Provides Document Security

Enterprise project managers and decision-makers have good reason to pay close attention to the world of cybersecurity. The cost of cybercrime is projected to hit an annual $10.5 trillion by 2025 with global organizations impacted in some way or another. According to IBM, the global average cost of a data breach in 2023 was USD 4.45 million, a 15% increase over 3 years and number that's not likely to get any lower. At the same time, there is an industry-wide cybersecurity skills shortage that experts peg at approximately three million unfilled positions.

The more data an organization processes on a daily basis, the bigger a target it becomes. Strict data breach notification laws are putting more responsibility on enterprises to take adequate steps towards protecting their users’ data effectively while making them increasingly accountable for security failures.

At the same time, there's no more room for paper documents in today’s business world. Paper is difficult to process in large volumes, it travels slowly from one process to another, and it presents a set of intractable security problems that large organizations have faced for decades. This is the main reason organizations choose to move towards digital transformation.

Under these conditions, implementing automated and intelligent solutions for securely collecting, processing, and archiving documents is crucial. Document digitization is an important first step towards automating unsecured processes and achieving compliance with cybersecurity best practices.

How Secure Document Management Works for Large Companies

Data privacy and cybersecurity are major concerns for large organizations. Keeping track of records in an organized, effective way is hard enough when large numbers of employees have access. Manually verifying the authorization, access privileges, and responsibilities of every employee is not feasible without an automated solution for digital transformation.

A secure enterprise-level document management system has to gather, collect, and analyze document transactions in a way that streamlines document security management. Without an army of security technicians available to manually verify every event log and compliance requirements, the need for automated digital transformation and record management is clear.

Records management is one of the key areas that security-oriented executives need to focus on. For large organizations, a secure document management solution, like Ripcord’s Canopy, must incorporate several important features:

#1 End-to-End Encryption

Enterprise data should be encrypted at rest and in transit at every point during its travel throughout the corporate network. A digital record is as secure as the weakest path it travels on, and 256-bit encryption remains practically unbreakable with current technology.

#2 Multi-Layered Security

While many security experts are moving towards the zero trust model, there are solutions for single sign-on integration with secure and trusted identity access management tools. Ultimately, there must be a balance between security and productivity as well as options for quarantining compromised systems if disaster strikes.

#3 Multi-Factor Authentication

Secure document management requires more than just a good password policy. Advanced multi-factor authentication and behavioral biometrics offer best-in-class document security without compromising process efficiency.

#4 Real-Time Analysis

Large organizations often find themselves the targets of innovative, never-before-seen exploits. Protecting yourself against these zero-day vulnerabilities requires immediate access to comprehensive real-time analysis.

#5 On-Demand Compliance

Managing compliance for a large organization with multiple locations is difficult. Managing compliance for paper documents in such an organization is nearly impossible. Reputable managed service vendors employ compliance experts to offer enterprises access to guaranteed-compliant infrastructure as a service.

Additionally, a successful enterprise-level document management solution must be able to maintain this stringent level of security while performing complex, cloud-enabled tasks like optical character recognition. It needs to be able to communicate securely with users and vendors without giving cybercriminals vital information.

Robotic Digitization is the Answer to Secure Document Management

In a typical enterprise, a large team of individual employees handles various aspects of the overall document management process. Someone collects and sorts incoming documents, someone else scans them, a data entry employee adds the information to the appropriate record, and so on. Every single step in the process represents a potential cybersecurity vulnerability. Every employee-oriented process requires strict policies for email usage, data transmission, physical document handling, and more. Effectively managing compliance under these conditions requires performing expensive and disruptive mock audits to catch negligent employees before regulators (or cybercriminals) do.

All of these processes consume time and energy without providing value to the organization’s document security system. Robotic digitization uses optical character recognition and software-defined compliance verification processes to mitigate the risks of error-prone manual processes and establish highly secure automated infrastructure in its place.

At the same time, automated retention and disposition policies ensure that records management remains fundamentally efficient. A fully automated document management system frees the enterprise workforce to focus on strategic, high-impact processes that generate value for stakeholders and customers.