Document Security: Keeping Compliant
Posted by Thibault Mortier ● 11/15/18 11:50 AM

Document Security: Keeping Compliant

You are oh so close to becoming a document security expert. That's right, you’ve made it to the final article in our document security series! We’ve already covered network and physical infrastructure security, user training, and file centralization. In this article, we’re going to learn all about keeping your organization compliant.

Compliance is kind of super important

The new GDPR regulations in the European Union (EU) have made data compliance chic again. However, the reality is that you’ve probably been dealing with privacy law and regulatory compliance requirements for quite a while now. It makes sense too. It’s nearly 3 times cheaper to comply with regulations than it is to ignore them. In monetary terms, that amounts to €8 million in savings for a company with 5,000-25,000 employees.

Generally, to comply with these laws, you need to have the proper safeguarding policies and procedures, security measures, and security systems in place to ensure the safety of your sensitive documents.

However, governments are becoming increasingly serious about making sure that companies don’t cut corners when securing their files and documents. So, it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that things have changed with these new regulations. First, if you’re thinking, “Ha, I’m an American company. I don’t need to care about GDPR,” you’re wrong. GDPR applies to any company that deals with the data of EU residents regardless of where they’re based. Remember that client that you have in Denmark? Yep, that means that you need to follow GDPR regulations.

With GDPR, you need to control where and how customer data stored. On top of that, users can ask you to update or delete their data whenever they want. If you’re not able to comply with user requests, it’s going to cost you. Those nasty fines have done a good job in motivating companies to get serious about data security. Yes, it can seem a bit intimidating but, in the end, it’s good business.

So, how do you deal with these regulations? The public cloud and a good document management system can go a long way to keeping you compliant. Not only will they help to secure your files but, since public cloud platforms need to maintain their own set of stringent compliance standards, it will help you to simplify your own compliance processes. That’s not all though. You’ll need to have permission management and audit monitoring capabilities as well. Lucky for you, the public cloud has got you covered.

Keep your Information Secure with AODocs and Virtru - Security Webinar

You shall not pass (without the right permissions)

Making sure that the wrong people don’t have access to your sensitive files is important. It’s also a bit overly optimistic to think that no one will ever accidentally share a file with the wrong person. That’s why it’s essential for companies to be able to manage document access permissions.

When you don’t, your data is a risk. Companies like GoDaddy, Verizon, and Dow Jones have all exposed sensitive information because of improperly managed Amazon Web Services storage settings. How did it happen? An employee simply misconfigured the security permissions.

How can you avoid finding yourself in the same situation? Well, automation helps quite a bit. By automating your access permissions, you’ll take the responsibility away from your teams and, in turn, reduce the risk of files falling into the wrong hands. Automated sharing permission workflows will set the correct document access permissions without any help from users while permission monitoring tools can alert you if a file with sensitive content is shared with people who are not supposed to have access.

Document Security PDF: Nine Reasons Why Everything Should be in the Public Cloud

Watchers on the firewall

If your documents contain something that hackers really want, they’re going to come back time and time again to probe your systems for vulnerabilities. It takes a lot of work to keep tabs on all their new attacks.

However, when your documents are in the public cloud, it’s no longer your problem. The cloud provider is in charge of the network security instead. That means that their security team will be constantly monitoring the network audit logs for you.

The benefits of the public cloud don’t end there. The cloud makes it far easier to actually analyze your audit data. Rather than having data stuck behind unfriendly firewall admin consoles, you’ll be able to centralize all your audit data. When you have this data together in one place, you’re in a much better spot to actually pull some useful insights from it. There’s also real-time monitoring. Automated alerts let you immediately respond to a security breach while audit log data can be used to pinpoint what data was exposed, dramatically reducing the impact of a security breach.

There you have it. Now, you’re in the know about document security. If you want even more in-depth information, check out our document security white paper. It covers everything from our blog posts (here’s part one, part two, and part three) and more in far more detail.


AODocs Cloud Content Services Platform

AODocs is a content services platform designed to modernize the way businesses work - offering a low code environment to build content-rich applications, powerful automation and workflows, and business applications with comprehensive security and compliance capabilities. Discover how AODocs helps IT departments safe-guard company documents and facilitate collaboration in a flexible, easy-to-audit environment.

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Tags: Compliance, Security