document management security threat, hacker at a computer

With more and more of our business operations moving to digital spaces, document management security is of ever-increasing importance. Keeping your sensitive data files under digital lock and key means your customers can trust your company to value their information the same way you value your personal information.

Trust breeds customer loyalty, brand recognition, business longevity, and prosperity in the long run. Outsourcing your document management security to industry experts like River City Data is a wise business decision.

Today, contact River City Data for a free estimate on securing your data with leading-edge systems that place your company and client documents in a virtual Fort Knox.

Essential Components for Document Management Security

When a company data breach occurs, the consequences can add up financially and with irreparable damage to hard-won reputations. According to IBM.com, the average cost of a data breach in 2020 totals up to $3.92 million.

Between customer loss, loss mitigation, reputation management, data security improvement, and gaining back the invaluable trust you’ve garnered, it’s better to avoid data breaches from day one.

The building blocks of document management security may seem like common sense, but it’s beneficial to regularly evaluate your adherence to the data security basics. Here’s what you should look for each year as you evaluate your document security protocols.

1. Encrypt your files.

Sending files in secure forms means using an encrypted link when sending or receiving digital documents. Employing an SSL (secure socket layer) when sending, archiving, or receiving data means that your information is impervious to hackers.

Though SSL can utilize symmetric and asymmetric encryption methods, asymmetric encryption is the best choice for sending documents worldwide. Asymmetric encryption requires a public key for encryption on the sender side, but a private key for description on the receiver side.

Of course, determining which files to encrypt is a matter between you and your regulatory organizations. Businesses such as medical clinics, dental offices, governmental agencies, and anyone else receiving and storing sensitive customer, client, or patient data must comply with HIPAA practices, for example. File encryption for archiving is paramount for these businesses.

2. Limit file access.

Placing limits on who can see certain files within your company is a boots-on-the-ground way to ensure data security. Knowing who has access to your company documents at all times should be part of every yearly data security evaluation.

In times of employment turn-over, staffing growth, or physical location changes, data access must be one of the first items you check to keep your documents secure. In effect, if an employee doesn’t require access to certain documents, they shouldn’t have it.

Using authentication pages as a way to limit who sees a document is crucial on all hardware within your company purview. This hardware could include:

- Printers
- Laptops
- Desktops
- Mobile phones
- Scanners

3. Know what and when to archive.

Keeping a glut of old data in your system is an invitation for disorganization and a potential breach, especially with large paper document collections.

When you digitally archive and index data, you can improve your data organization and access as well as improving your system security. In addition to adding security layers to your historical documents, you’ll also save space by moving them to a secure server, which you can outsource.

Further, accessing archived data is simple with leading-edge tools like OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and innovative indexing methodology. You can also set reminders to purge your archives periodically of old files you no longer need to hold.

4. Staff education is crucial.

Every new employee onboarding process should include extensive training on document security, especially in healthcare, government, finance, and legal sectors.

Providing clarity as to who should have data access, what the authentication process is, and how to legitimately access needed information helps you ensure good data management and helps your employees succeed from day one.

5. Have reliable backups.

Duplicating and archiving information on secure servers with encrypted access can save your company valuable time and money in the event of a natural disaster, fire, or other physical catastrophe.

Of course, backing up your data off-site with a data management company you trust is essential to uninterrupted business operation, no matter the calamity that may occur.

Advantages of Outsourcing Document Security Management

Most company owners understand the importance of document security. However, the number of breaches that occur each year suggest that implementing reliable security strategies in-house can be challenging.

Outsourcing elements of your data security can only add to your good document management practices. Here’s what a reliable data conversion and storage partner can do for your organization.

Save on space and equipment. Kitting out your office space to provide extensive and secure document storage can put a massive drain on your budget and physical footprint. Outsourcing your data archiving and converting your paper documents to digital formats frees up your filing cabinets as well as several budget lines. With SSL encryption, and plenty of storage space on our dedicated, secure servers, River City Data helps you streamline and secure your data in archives you can easily access based on indexing criteria you create.
Provide reliable data backups. With offsite, secure data storage and simple indexing, your documents remain physically safe should a disaster strike your business. Even if a building water pipe bursts, jeopardizing your files, you can relax knowing you’ve stored your data well out of harm’s way.
Ensure document management security. Enabling document access via SSL means that anything you transmit between your document storage partner and your devices is secure. Of course, adhering to the practices listed above helps add layers of safety to your sensitive or privacy-protected data once it hits your laptop, PC, or other company hardware.

Trust River City Data for Reliable Document Security

In addition to using SSL when we send, receive, or store data, our team is also certified in HIPAA protocol. Our clients understand their privacy is our top priority, as well as providing unparalleled quality document conversions and storage upon which you can depend.

Contact us today to set up a free estimate. We customize our document management security strategy to your unique needs and challenges. Our clients enjoy our world-class know-how and experience, alongside our small-town values and accessibility. We look forward to keeping your data safe, today and in the future.

office worker distressed with lots of files and folders and legal paperwork

How are you storing data? Do you have a room full of filing cabinets? If your office space is a cave of paper, it may be time to consider moving into the digital storage age with legal scanning services.

If you’re contemplating transitioning to digital document management, contact River City Data for a free estimate. We’ll prepare and scan your documents, tag your information for easy searchability, and provide secure access for your employees and clients.

Why Would I Want to Change How I Store My Documents? Paper Feels So Safe and Familiar

There is something solid about holding onto the document you need. You keep your passport in hand while you’re waiting to go through airport security. You keep a copy of your birth certificate locked up.

Paper documents have undeniable value. They are also cumbersome and fragile.

Let’s compare traditional paper document storage to a digital option.

Digitized Documents Can Be Searched Easily

Can you quickly put your hands on a specific document? Perhaps you know precisely how your paper files are organized and can finger through the right file drawer to find that single sheet of paper.

You might have one or two members of your team that can accomplish this. Do you have staff whose primary duty is to locate information?

One limitation of paper files is the singular format. Files are usually arranged by an overarching organizational method, such as alphabetizing by name.

This singular format means that to search your files, you always start from the same point.

But what if you don’t want to search for a file by name? What if you need every file from a specific date or every file for a particular location?

Paper files can be difficult to search and cross-reference. By storing your data in a digital format, you will have access to search your data by whatever identifier you value.

Search by client name, case number, date, or any other filter. You can also add filters to search various subsets within a value.

Digitized Documents Can Be Shared Easily

If you want to share paper documents, you will likely be taking a trip to the copier machine. Once you’ve passed those copies around, you will have limited control over what happens to them next.

If a client or an employer misplaces a document, the information contained in that paper could be compromised.

Give your staff easy access to information with digital access to scanned documents. You can allow read-only access to those who need to be informed and editing access only to appropriate employees.

Scanned information can be shared quickly without going through reams of paper. Digital documents are less likely to be lost or accidentally shared with someone who shouldn’t have access.

Your Documents Can Be Accessed Remotely

Have you ever gotten to a meeting, opened your briefcase, and discovered you were missing the item you needed most?

If your documents are stored digitally, you will have access to them wherever you go. Don’t worry about hauling hundreds of pages around. Plus, you won’t have to worry about finding yourself unprepared for that meeting.

Your employees will spend less time trying to get their hands on documents and more time getting results for clients. And, if the staff needs to work from home or another remote location, electronic access is a must.

Is Paper Safer Because You Can Hold It In Your Hands?

If you keep your legal documents in filing cabinets, you probably lock them at night. And then lock the filing cabinet room. And then lock the building.

The physical act of turning a lock can help a person feel secure, but it doesn’t protect you from:

Fire
Flooding
Mold
Spills
Unauthorized copies

If your filing cabinet room goes up in flames, what will you do?

If your legal documents have been scanned and saved electronically, a flood or fire in one location won’t result in a catastrophic data loss. When you give staff and clients read-only access to confidential documents, they can’t change, copy, or destroy them. And if you need someone to discontinue having access to a document, you don’t have to try to take back a piece of paper. You just push a few buttons.

Your documents will be safer in an encrypted file than they will in a filing cabinet. You’re still locking the doors at night; they’re just digital. And actually, you don’t have to lock them at all, because they stay inaccessible to anyone without authorization.

Why You Should Use Professional Legal Scanning Services

You’re ready to step into the digital storage age. But there’s so much paper copy to switch over!

Don’t waste human resources having employees stand around feeding the scanner. They have enough to do without taking on this task (don’t they?).

Legal scanning services provide an economical solution. You receive a dedicated team of single-taskers. They’ll work only on your conversion — and not stop to answer your phones.

The most important part of any great job is preparation. Your scanning service team will take the time to sort, repair, and remove staples from all those precious documents before scanning.

Your data will be scanned with state-of-the-art machines that are meant to handle large quantities of paper. Your office all-in-one was not made for this task.

Legal scanning service providers are experts at managing sensitive data. They stay up to the minute on compliance laws and are familiar with the legal industry.

Your information will be tagged by whatever search terms you choose. Imagine the time saved when your employees can type a few terms to retrieve exactly what they need.

If you choose document hosting and cloud storage, your data will be securely encrypted, yet ready at your fingertips. If you prefer to manage your own data, your documents can be loaded to a private drive that will be entirely in your control.

It’s time to advance your company through digital data management. Contact River City Data today for a free estimate of customized legal scanning services (and other services too!).

young woman employee looking at data modeling on stacks of papers and files

When you’re buried under virtual or physical piles of PDFs, paper documents, or out-dated storage tools (CD-Rom, or–gasp!–floppy disks), coalescing your information into one indexable format is a daunting task. Data modeling is the first step to making sense of every record, no matter its age or storage method.

No business leader we know has extra time for data conversion, indexing, storage, and security. Per human nature, incomplete data conversion and archiving tend to build up over time, because they’re no one’s favorite tasks.

Instead of procrastinating this crucial element of business success and customer privacy, partner with the pros at River City Data. We’ll customize a data conversion, indexing, and storage strategy that grows with your company so that data privacy and organization is never a problem again.

Call us today for a free quote, and we’ll handle all your records with the care and security they deserve.

Data Modeling: Code for “How’re We Going to Find Anything Ever Again?”

Imagine you spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of person-hours organizing your data. You’ve purchased filing cabinets, folders, colored tabs, and every kind of “sticky-note” under the sun.

By the time you’re finished with your files, they look neat and tidy, years of business contacts can now be accessed quickly, the file drawers all close tightly, you can lock the files for security, and you’re about to pat yourself on the back.

However, you forgot to tell anyone that you used your clients’ birthdays to categorize them in the files. Then, you hire in a new office manager, and they assume you’ve used the customer’s last name as a primary data indexing tool.

So, now your new manager cannot find any information on your clients, plus, she uses her last-name assumption for all future data filing. You’ve got a massive potential data mess on your hands in this scenario.

The one thing you must do to combat this data disaster is data modeling.

Create a Rubric that Serves You Now and in the Future

Of course, today, we’re done with paper documents and tabbed manila folders in most organizations. Data modeling refers to digital data indexing, storage, and interaction.

Your data model can also inform the type of physical space and components you use for data storage and reporting as well, some of which may still be the odd filing cabinet. But, most companies seek out ways to condense and archive their data while still enabling easy reporting and analytics.

It’s essential to think out into the future as much as possible concerning storing and indexing data. Try revisiting your business plan. (If you don’t have a current one, now’s a perfect time to create it.) Look at your growth and sales goals for the next five years or so.

Your data model should reflect where you want to BE in five years, as much as it should serve your needs where you ARE. Why plan to keep purchasing more and more physical file cabinets when you can obtain more secure and nimble data storage in the cloud right now, for example?

Three Types of Data Models

For a successful data model, there are three essential steps in the process:

1. Conceptual data model: Here, you define entities that deliver or collect data, like customers and products. Then, you list the attributes of each entity, such as name (customer or product), customer number, and product price. Finally, you determine and describe the relationship between the entities.
  Conceptual data models are intentionally high-level.
  Think of this step as building the foundation for data collection and organization–a statement of which information is most crucial to your business model. This step creates a common data language and priority list for all stakeholders, company-wide.
2. Logical data model: In this phase, you’ll specify data structure and the relationship between data bits. For example, you’ll define how data from one project may interact with information from another source within the company.
  You’ll answer questions like “how will I integrate and utilize information across several departments or teams?” And, you’ll put values and nomenclature to those data bits.
  At this stage, you’re still thinking in general terms–defining data relationships within your operation and how you want them to interact.
3. Physical data model: Here’s where you’ll get more precise about triggers, keys, views, indexes, authorization, database columns, as well as the technology you’ll use to access and store your data. (Will you use the cloud or a physical server location?)

Achieve Consensus, and Then Train, Train, Train.

Once you (and your leadership team, if applicable) have landed on a data modeling strategy that fits your needs now and can easily grow with your expanding audience, product lists, and physical footprint, it’s time to educate.

Any data model is only as effective as the people who know how to use it. Adding data collection and use training to your on-boarding process is crucial. This staff education is the only way to ensure your data works for YOU once you’ve implemented your data modeling strategy.

Departments can become entrenched in the dreaded “silo” when they don’t have access to the same information. Without the judicious use and sharing of the data you collect in sales, product performance, customer needs, client outcomes, and more, your entire operation suffers.

When your entire company speaks the same data language, you can access and use your key information to drive marketing, product development, and service delivery.

Partner with the Pros for Data Modeling that Works

Once you’ve determined your conceptual, logical, and physical data models, River City Data can help you implement your strategy the right way.

Our conversion, indexing, and storage methodologies help you accurately index your records with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, save physical space, decrease staffing costs, and ensure the highest level of security and privacy. Plus, we enable on-demand access to all your data, so you never miss a needed metric.

Contact us today for a free quote, and start taming your rogue data piles with the most reliable, professional team in the business.

Document security is an issue that businesses face every day in the corporate world. Any mismanaged records, data, or documents can cause a loss of time, effort, and reputation.

Don’t let data mismanagement lead to breaches in security and substantial setbacks in daily operations. Having a security system put into place is essential to your companies well-being.

When a business uploads documents to a cloud or storage system, they are now victim to external data breaches, such as hackers, viruses, and a multitude of different malware. While stored paper records are at risk of internal theft and physical damage, document security decisions should be taken very seriously and done wisely.

Contact River City Data today and talk to one of our highly trained professionals about how to take your document security to the next level. We will help you understand every step of the process.

Overview of Document Security

Document security is the way that all classified paper or digital documents are kept safe and secure. The safety of records consists of how the files are managed, backed-up, organized, stored, filed, delivered, and eventually destroyed.

With many different factors threatening the security of your documents, it is crucial to know the importance of a back-up and storage plan. Unfortunately, document security is not as simple as choosing a cloud with adequate data space. You must understand the ins and outs of the security features to restrict document access.

Once you have a plan on how you will back-up your data in the event data is lost, test your storage system to ensure your files are easily retrievable. Having a plan to retrieve lost information is equally important as it’s security.

Security Methods for Paper Records

Some of the biggest threats to paper records are internal theft, fraudulent files, and natural disasters. There are a few methods to manage each of these security risks.

Locked Filing Areas

Keeping the documents in a locked storage area with locked filing cabinets is a necessary and straightforward method to secure paper records. Maintaining the documents securely locked away will ensure they are away from wandering eyes and out of the wrong hands.

Environmental Hazard Protection

The best way to keep documents from destruction from a natural disaster such as a flood or fire is an off-site storage facility. Off-site facilities use climate-controlled systems and fire suppression methods to protect documents from environmental hazards out of our control.

Storage Facility

An off-site storage facility not only protects from any natural disasters, but also includes benefits such as locked premises, a highly trained security staff, and 24/7 video monitoring.

Security Methods for Electronic Data

Cloud storage and other document management storage solutions (DMS) software implement methods such as encryption and access controls to help protect files.

Data Redaction

Document redaction is the process of permanently removing any visible text or graphics from a document. Redacting a document helps remove sensitive data during the document scanning process.

Encryption of files

File encryption keeps electronic records safe. In the event of a hacker gaining access in an open network, they are inaccessible without a decryption code.

Access Control List (ACL)

An access control list allows you to control the access of sensitive documents to authorized users only. You can create a list of predefined users, and control who has access to what content- keeping snooping to a minimum.

Third-Party Document Security

There is always the option to hire a company that can provide storage for your documents versus spending money on leasing a separate space for storage. A third-party option will provide you with a cost-effective solution and a guarantee of the security of your documents.

Rest at ease, knowing that storage facilities take document security very seriously. A storage facility will be secure and provide professionals who have extensive experience handling, storing, and retrieving documents on behalf of many companies and businesses.

8 Security Mistakes to Avoid

Mismanaged and incorrectly labeled records. Thus making documents impossible to locate and utterly disorganized.
Documents that are stored online without proper encryption. They are likely to fall prey to hackers and malicious malware attacks, despite having security methods in place. Encryption is key.
Inconsistent document storage. When documents lack daily management, they become disorganized and extremely time-consuming to retrieve later.
A huge mistake to avoid is failing to ensure that your disaster recovery plan is successful.
Another common mistake is not correctly prioritizing the protection of your data. It is crucial to know what data is most valuable to your business’s functions.
Incorrectly managing passwords. Deciding on an easy to remember and a secure, lengthy password is crucial.
Keeping a record of all your security measures and failing to protect that document. While it is essential to keep a record of your security methods, keep that document protected at all costs.
Thinking that your network, OS, server, etc. is secure already. You can never be too paranoid when it comes to document security.

Why Document Security is Important

Although document storage and security can seem intimidating and time-consuming and costly, with the correct management and security measures, you will set your business up for success and keep your assets safe from threats.

By successfully using document management storage systems, all of your company’s documents are made easily accessible in a user-friendly, secure, and organized manner. If using a storage facility, employees are excellently trained and vetted through a security process. They will maintain your records in a climate-controlled and damage resistant facility.

Document management systems and storage facilities are, without a doubt, the best choice to ensure your company’s assets are protected. They provide unmatchable management and top-notch security. All while maintaining a cost-effective and user-friendly interface that will benefit all your business needs.

River City Data is here to take care of all your document security needs. Let us worry about all your data while you focus on the vital task of running your business. Get in contact with one of our highly-trained professionals today!

Assessing Document Management Security for Businesses

Category: Document Security