What you Should Know about Document Protection & Regulatory Compliance
Data security and document protection mean that your company’s classified information is secured from cybercriminals in every form—from being copied, viewed, altered, deleted, printed, or destroyed by hackers. Safeguarding your company’s documents and data must involve protecting them at rest and in motion.
No matter the size of your business, protecting your company’s documents and data is not just crucial for its own sake; it is now mandatory by compliance regulations. If you own a large company, your IT department could have the expertise to be updated on compliance concerns, including any new demands as they take place. However, suppose you have a retail store outlet with inventory management, a company website, and email newsletters or own a mid-level startup with an evolving cloud-based IT infrastructure. In that case, you may still be on the learning curve.
Regulatory compliance is often regarded as a cumbersome and aggressive task enforced upon companies; however, these come with numerous benefits. Regulating document security and data storage has been instituted to safeguard the consumer and the company from data breaches.
There are two prominent examples of regulatory compliance in the United States to protect company information. These include the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). Additional compliance regulations include FERPA, FINRA, HIPAA, and Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Besides, there are many others across the United States and countries where your business may not be located. However, if you have consumers and suppliers there, you may also have to include the regulations from these areas to add to your comply-with file.
These rules and guidelines reflect the existing state of technology. The tools an organization uses or is recommended to use according to compliance rules can ensure safe business—for instance, employing 256-bit AES encryption for data at rest and in transit.
The right place to ensure your business is compliant is to look within the industry or sector that your business belongs to and know about compliance. You may want to:
Understand significant laws and industry policies that your organization must be compliant with.
Get in-depth knowledge of your existing infrastructure, activities, information and compliant applications.
Choose robust data and document security products that meet compliance requirements.
Obtain certifications for these data security tools and services for your records and the company’s IT compliance status.
Train your staff regarding data protection and document security as part of compliance. For instance, employees can be educated about not carrying sensitive company, consumer or third-party data records outside the workplace unless the information is securely encrypted.
As a comprehensive solution for all compliance needs, digital rights management software provides encryption and granular usage controls for all documents and PDF files it secures. It can ensure that sensitive documents or confidential PDF files cannot be viewed outside the workplace.
More than 2500 data security breaches occur in the United States daily. This alarming fact must drive home that compliance standards must not be viewed as an afterthought. Instead, following compliance guidelines as a standard minimum requirement in your company’s data protection and document security strategy is essential.
A risk-based approach to compliance can help your company identify the areas of high risk within your organization’s compliance universe. You can build and prioritize compliance programs around these data risks based on the current state. However, adhering to compliance does not mean that your company is safe from harm. Instead, consider document security and compliance as a journey that must go hand-in-hand to safeguard your company data against leakage and theft.
Accomplishing compliance means mastering the complexity of going through realms of deployed applications in your organization. Even more crucial is that your compliance solution must ensure that your business activities are seamlessly performed while allowing your company to grow naturally without delays and restrictions. Regardless of whether the compliance requirements are to protect financial data, medical records of patients and consumers, government oversight inquiry or third-party compliance, digital rights management can give you the ease of use you need to secure documents and track their use.
Some of the most significant data breaches that have taken place in the last two years across large organizations, including British Airways, Google, Marriott, Capital One and others, drive home the point of the pressing need for a data protection compliance program among businesses. A successful data breach can take place in less than a minute. However, these companies could take weeks or sometimes even months to detect that an infringement has taken place. As one of the most critical assets in your business, data protection compliance must be your top priority, and in this regard, DRM can be a helpful document security tool to ensure compliance.
