Essentially, document security ensures that unauthorized persons cannot access your business documents. It might not be possible to do this with 100% effectiveness but an attempt should be made to see that security breaches occur extremely rarely.

How you do this is the topic of this article.

How Do Security Breaches Occur?

Security breaches occur at points of vulnerability in your document management system. Examples include:

• In a paper based system, document security can be breached when the paper is lying around unattended during its transit, at a user’s table, or in the filing section
• A paper document can also be misplaced or disposed off carelessly and fall into the hands of unauthorized persons
• In a computer system, an unauthorized person could access a document that is accessible through an unattended computer, and copy it to a removable media for taking out
• External hackers can steal your passwords and access your documents using software tools or other means

Who would be Interested in Your Business Documents?

There are certain categories of persons who can be very interested in your business documents:

• Competitors who would like to have full details about your competitive strategies and business plans
• Dishonest employees and outsiders who would like to make a quick buck stealing the documents and selling them to competitors
• Disgruntled employees with some grievance who would like to damage your business in some way, say by wiping out a whole disk of documents
• Malicious persons who take pleasure in hacking into computer systems and damaging it in different ways

How Do You Prevent Security Breaches

Certain procedures can make it very difficult to access documents in an unauthorized manner and minimize security breaches to the extent possible.

• Document access should be restricted to authorized persons who are given access rights and passwords that they must use before than can access any document
• Access rights to highly confidential and sensitive documents would be given only to a few highly trusted persons
• All employees would be trained to follow secure working methods and the system would also have features that can, say, shut down a computer if left unattended for a certain time (and would require passwords to open it for use)
• Firewall software can restrict access to the system to allowed entities thus preventing malicious software from entering
• Antivirus and antispyware software can detect and prevent/remove these kinds of malicious programs
• Data encryption tools can make it possible to transmit sensitive documents in a way that makes it practically impossible to steal them during transmission
• An audit trail can record what each person did with the documents that person accessed

Measures like the above can prevent most security breaches (in the process they might also make it for genuine outsiders to reach you!) A security consultant can help you identify any vulnerability in your system in a way that enables genuine communications.