The Ultimate Guide to Document Security: Protecting Your Data in the Digital Age

With businesses becoming more digitized over the last decade, the majority of documents are now stored and shared online. This has unlocked a plethora of benefits, but it also means that sensitive information is vulnerable to various threats. Unauthorized access or changes to important documents have the potential to cause significant financial and reputational harm to businesses.

According to a report published by IBM, the average cost of a data breach was $4.45 million in 2023, further highlighting the importance of stringent document security protocols for your organization, especially document security in banking.

In the article below, we’ll explore the document security niche, garnering a better understanding of potential threats, ways that enterprises can shore up their document security set up, suggested tools and software suites – Like MSTs eViewer – that help to put your mind at ease, and more.

Understanding Document Security: Why Is It Important?

Document security refers to the safeguarding of digital and/or physical documents from unwanted access, modification, or theft. It involves establishing company-wide policies, processes, and solutions that dictate how information is sent and control who can access, view, and interact with a document.

The significance of document security cannot be overstated, particularly in areas such as government, finance, insurance, healthcare, engineering, legal, and technology businesses. Government agencies and businesses often handle sensitive information data and are responsible for ensuring the security of documents containing sensitive information. Unfortunately, many businesses still fall short when it comes to effective document management. For instance, a data risk report released by Varonis found that 64 percent of financial service companies had over 1,000 sensitive files accessible to all employees. If these documents fall into the wrong hands, the consequences have the potential to be severe and far-reaching.

From a compliance standpoint, securing documents is equally crucial. Global regulations are becoming stricter, demanding that businesses take extra measures to protect user data. A breach can lead to data leaks, hefty non-compliance fines, and damage to your reputation.

Having a robust document security policy and the right tools can ensure your critical documents remain secure and accessible only to those who need them. MST’s eViewer HTML5 solution is great in this regard. It provides organizational admins the ability to easily control access to documents and images, track changes, convert documents, all without sacrificing security.

Examples of Document Security Threats

Whether you have a private network or rely on a public cloud, your documents face various security risks. Let’s look at them in more detail:

• Cyber Threats: Ransomware, hacking, and social engineering attacks like phishing are the most common threats to sensitive documents. For instance, an attacker may infiltrate your network and steal important documents, demanding a ransom for their return. Similarly, they may hack into a server or cloud to access critical documents like patents, financial reports, screenplays, contracts, etc.
• Insider Threats: Documents may also get compromised due to employee negligence. After all, human errors are one of the primary causes of data breaches. For instance, an employee may download a sensitive document on a personal or public device. Insider threats can also include deliberate theft, leaking, or corruption of documents, for example, by a rogue employee.
• Physical Threats: Documents in a physical state may be even more vulnerable than digital ones. If a bad actor, internal or external, gets access to a security-critical document, they can steal, copy, or destroy it. Similarly, they may physically damage a device the document is stored on, such as a computer or server.

Common Features & Best Practices of Document Security

Fortunately, there are multiple ways to secure digital documents. MST offers all the necessary features to implement multiple layers of security according to business requirements or circumstances.

Here are the main features and best practices commonly associated with digital document security:

Encryption

One of the most frequently used techniques for securing documents is encryption. It involves algorithms that use a special encryption key to turn the document contents into a ciphertext, which can only be decrypted back to the original form via the key.

With encryption, you can ensure that only the person with the secure key can access it. Even if an attacker somehow gets the file, it won’t be useful to them without that key.

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is one of the most reliable standards. It uses multiple rounds of encryption and splits the data into smaller blocks. MST uses the AES-256 protocol in its end-to-end encryption of documents to preserve their integrity.

Access Controls and Authentication

Limiting access to authorized personnel is vital to protecting information in critical documents. Although the documents may need to be stored in a place accessible by many people in the organization, document-level access control will ensure that only those who are allowed to view or modify the file can touch it.

For example, a law firm may store case documents in the cloud accessible by most employees. However, it may want to limit access to evidence related to a case exclusively to the lawyers working on that case. In such a case, authentication and role-based access control (RBAC) can be used to make the documents available only to relevant folks.

MST seamlessly integrates with authentication and SSO protocols like SAML, OAuth, and Kerberos. Thanks to SSO, employees can use the same credentials they use with other applications to gain access to a document (if allowed).

Secure Document Sharing

You often have to share documents within the organization or outside it. Either way, it’s imperative to ensure the document is shared securely so it is not compromised on the way or at its destination.

End-to-end encryption can ensure that documents are safe during transfer, regardless of your method. Here are some more ways to secure document sharing:

• Share password-protected files with a strong password
• Set time limits on access
• Authenticate access by requiring sign-in, ideally with two-factor authentication

Redaction & Masking

What if you want to share a document but hide parts of it? This is where redaction and masking software comes in. You can redact and hide any sensitive information in the document. For instance, when sharing forms with sensitive information like social security number, address, or phone number, you can use the redaction tool to hide that information. That will save you the hassle of creating an alternative document without all that sensitive information.

MST’s eViewer HTML5 platform works with all file formats, redacting text and images while preserving the original document using data masking and redaction techniques.

Redaction can ensure compliance with data privacy regulations, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This regulation prohibits companies from sharing user data with third parties without their consent.

To find out more, take a look at our article about data redaction and masking.

Watermarking

Watermarking is another technique to protect documents, and it’s typically used to enforce copyrights. Using a tool, you can add a visible or invisible watermark like ‘Confidential’ or ‘brand name’ to a file and ensure that it’s not copied or reproduced.

Watermarks can be used on most file types, whether text documents or media. For instance, creative agencies can share marketing artwork with watermarks to maintain ownership and prevent non-permitted use. It essentially allows you to share documents without worrying about copyright infringement.

Audit Trails

An audit trail in the context of document security is a date and time-stamped record of access or modification of a document. It can show who accessed and/or edited a file and when.

Maintaining the records of all the interactions with a file can be helpful in tracing actions to their source.

Audit trails help monitor document security across an organization. In the event of a change to the document, one can easily trace it to the user who made it. This can increase accountability in a collaborative space where more than one person works with a file. It can also be used to detect any unauthorized access.

Digital Signatures

Digital signatures or e-signatures provide an easy way to authenticate documents. Signatures accompanied by date and timestamps can also be used to determine if a document has been tampered with. Again, you can discover if any changes were made after the signing using audit trails.

This technology can be used with shared documents, for example, when sending invoices or agreements to business partners or clients. E-signatures also eliminate paper waste and save time.

eViewer’s e-signature feature uses advanced cryptographic technology and complies with the ESIGN Act (US) and eIDAS (EU). Users can sign documents from anywhere on any device by typing, touching, or scanning. To find out more about digital signatures, take a look at our guide “Understanding Digital Signature” for more information.

Document Management Systems (DMS)

A DMS can help with document version control so changes or updates can be easily managed. Similarly, it can enforce security policies for file access and storage. Any DMS would utilize most of the above features, like encryption, password protection, and secure redaction, to protect sensitive information from internal and external threats.

Compliance and Legal Considerations

Document management security is also important from a compliance perspective. Depending on where you operate, you may be liable to ensure data protection and privacy. Negligence in this matter is serious because many authorities impose fines for non-compliance. GDPR fines hit a record €2.1 billion in 2023. That shows that document security isn’t a choice but a necessity for companies collecting private data.

Here are a handful of examples of data protection and privacy regulations/standards that necessitate effective document security:

• GDPR—general data protection in the EU
• CCPA—privacy and consumer protection in California
• HIPAA—healthcare information protection in the US
• FERPA—student information protection in the US
• GLBA—financial information protection in the US
• FDA 21 CFR part 11—electronic records and signatures in Life Sciences in the US
• ISO 27001—the international standard for information security

MST’s eViewer helps businesses comply with these regulations with features like automated redaction, end-to-end encryption, watermarking, and audit trails.

Implementing Document Security in a Remote Work Environment

The hybrid and remote work models have further increased the need for comprehensive document security protocols. Security threats have increased as people work remotely on their own devices and use home networks. Recent research indicates that remote work has increased the likelihood of data breaches, and the associated cost is too high.

If a sensitive file shared with an employee is not protected with adequate document security measures, anyone accessing their device or WiFi can access it.

It’s important to ensure that remote workers have secure, encrypted access to websites or applications, with the least privilege, where they can access any sensitive documents. If the document must be shared for download and use, it should be encrypted and password-protected.

MST’s eViewer is remote-work-friendly by design. It enables secure access from anywhere and allows easy collaboration and version control. All activities on documents are trackable. Plus, built-in document type conversion allows remote workers to convert files to formats usable on their devices.

Case Studies

MST eViewer is used by companies everywhere to maintain the security and integrity of their documents.

Roche, a global healthcare and pharmaceutical leader, integrated eViewer with its Business Process Management solution. It needed an advanced solution to streamline global document management workflows for its marketing campaigns, ensure regulatory compliance, and keep costs down. eViewer not only secured the sharing and access of campaign documents, but its annotations feature encouraged real-time collaborative discussions. This way, their cross-functional teams in different regions could seamlessly collaborate without compromising security.

AON, a company offering insurance and consulting services, needed to handle millions of documents in outdated IBM formats. To address this problem, they used the MST Batch Converter to quickly and efficiently convert these documents into PDF or TIFF formats, integrating it with their existing IBM Content Manager system. This solution ensured data integrity, preserved metadata, utilized standardized document format, and improved accessibility.

Conclusion

Document security is an integral part of information security. It protects information contained in documents from cyber threats and human errors. More importantly, it makes it easier to collaborate on documents, even if the employers are working remotely on an out-of-network device.

MST eViewer offers all the features you need to secure access and collaboration on files. It’s an all-inclusive document security management tool that uses the latest data protection technologies and ensures compliance with regulatory frameworks. It accommodates over 100 file formats, automating conversion using standardized formats. And all of that comes with reliable and quality customer service.

To find out more about how MST’s eViewer software can help with your document management process, get in touch today.