Why Protect Your Documents?

Documents vary in importance for various organizations. Some documents should be seen by everyone as it would be beneficial to your company if they were to reach a wider audience. Others could spell doom for your organization if they were to end up in the wrong hands. Then there are also those that need to be accessible to a small number of individuals. All in all, you need to control whether your documents remain confidential or not.

Without the right document controls, the below situations may happen and leave you to contend with the aftermath of a serious document leak.

Hackers May Attack Your Organization

If your documents are not secure when hackers attack your organization, they will be able to access any file they want. They can then choose to share your trade secrets with the world or extort money from you.  Whatever the case, you can be sure that you will be facing financial losses.

Your Documents May Be Shared by Individuals in Your Organization

Your employees sharing your information is more common than hackers gaining access to your information.

Your employees could share your information with third parties accidentally, for example when someone shares a document with the wrong email recipient or when an employee’s devicewith sensitive files on them is stolen or lost.

Other employees are not as innocent. They may send out crucial files to a competitor who offers them a financial incentive to do so. They could also send your documents to media outlets. The bottomline is that, since you are not employing any document security measures, you have no control over whether they end up being public or not.

Some of the negative consequences of documents being leaked include:

• Loss of income or revenue – You might sell your documents for a price, such as training materials. If that material was suddenly freely available on the Internet, nobody would feel the need to buy it from you anymore.
• Non-compliance with regulations – Governments have passed laws on the use of various forms of data and how it should be stored and protected. So, if your data were to get out in the form of documents, it might constitute non-compliance with such regulations. This may result in financial penalties.
• Loss of reputation – As you probably know, a good reputation is critical for ensuring your company make profits. And, it takes years and a lot of work to build a good reputation for a brand. All that could go down the drain the moment your internal records are leaked. So, your current customers may no longer trust you to keep their information safe and would start looking to your competitors for the services they previously got from you.

So, how do you protect your documents?

For starters, you need to identify which documents you need to protect and who should have access to them.  Then you need to decide whether you need to have control over those documents once they have been distributed.  If the answer to this is yes then you need a document DRM system, especially like Locklizard

What protection does a document DRM system provide?

A document DRM systemuses various protection methods to ensure your documents remain secure regardless of location.  These include locking documents to authorized devices so they cannot be shared and using DRM controls to control document use.

It ensures the following:

1. Only authorized users have access to protected documents
2. Protected documents can never be shared with non-authorized users
3. You can control what locations protected documents can be used from
4. You can stop printing and screen grabbing
5. You can dynamically watermark documents to identify users
6. You can automatically expire documents after a number of days, views, prints, etc.
7. You can log document use
8. You can revoke access at any time even after distribution

Document DRM systems use encryption to stop unauthorized users gaining access to protected documents and licensing controls to control what devices protected documents can be viewed on.

Why is encryption and passwords not good enough?

Encryption is used as the basis for all document protection systems and passwords are generally used for keys.  However, once a document has been decrypted users now have available an unprotected copy of the document that they can do what they like with. Passwords can also be easily shared with others and broken.

So if you are serious about protecting documents and controlling their use then you need a document DRM systemfor secure document access and sharing.