Ten Things You Should Know About Document Security
Sensitive business documents can be stolen and sold to competitors
. Virus attacks can wipe out entire hard disks. Spyware can steal your identify and access your bank account and use your credit card. Natural disasters like fires can destroy the storage media that stores all your business data. Power fluctuations and system crashes can corrupt the data on the media.
1. Document security management seeks to prevent data loss from the varied kinds of threats to data. Unless a systematic approach is adopted for document security your business can even close down.
2. Very few businesses survive complete loss of business data and even partial losses can prove extremely serious. Consider losing all your customer data and invoice records. It can mean that you cannot recover your fees from credit customers that can equal a few months of sales. Or consider the secret product formula that gives you an edge in the market being stolen.
3. Document security starts with a careful look at all the risks the documents face and the impact of each. A clear idea about these can make top management aware of the real dangers that can easily occur, and as a result they are more likely to support security-enhancement measures.
4. One of the first security measures is preventing unauthorized access to documents. Only authorized persons should be able to access each type of data. Access restrictions should be placed both on classes of data and levels of employees. Access restrictions typically take the firm of access permissions to each employee or group of employees and the requirement to enter passwords to access the data an employee is authorized to access.
5. All applications must generate automatic audit trails that keep track of who accessed which document when, and what the person did with the document. Most data losses have been attributed to employees, and its essential that a tag be kept on their activities, and unusual activities should be investigated in detail.
6. Firewalls can prevent access to data on the internal network by external entities, such as hackers. Antivirus programs can guard against virus attacks and repair any files that may get attacked. Anti-spyware programs can detect spyware that various agencies, including identity thieves, manage to install on your systems.
7. Verified backups and their storage at separate locations can help the business recover from data losses caused by different events, such as natural disasters like a fire, accidental or intentional deletion of data from hard disks, data corruption caused by electrical disturbances and system crashes and malicious events like virus attacks.
8. Backups need to be verified to ensure that they are recoverable in case of need. Systematic policies and procedures can ensure that all critical data are backed up in an up-to-date or even real-time manner. In their absence, not all data might get backed up and data loss recovery can prove incomplete.
9. Electronic documents can be tampered with comparatively easily, and authentication procedures must be in place to validate critical documents at the recipients end. Measures like electronic signatures can help ensure that documents have not been altered since they were signed.
10. Above all, regular reviews must be carried out to identify current security vulnerabilities, train employees in document security practices and review practices like taking backups and implementation of document retention and destruction policies.
Standards for information security such as those issued under ISO 27002 can help businesses understand the complex issues involved and implement best practices for document security. With increasing dependence on electronic documents, this is an issue that cannot be ignored or left to untrained staff.
by: Manuel J. Montesino
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