Data Management when Going Paperless
Going paperless in the office is a big business trend right now. It’s a good way to save money on printing costs, it reduces security issues, and it’s more eco-friendly. If you haven’t already started the process, these tips will help you ditch the paper in your office.
It’s vital that you think about how you handle your company’s data management when going paperless. There is a lot of sensitive data stored in filing cabinets and you need to make sure that it’s all managed correctly.
During the transition from paper to digital, any data losses can cause serious problems for your business. That’s why you need to plan the process carefully and put data management at the centre. If you are going paperless, make sure you follow these data management rules.
Scan Everything In
Making copies of everything that you have paper copies of is so important. The last thing you want is to realize that you’ve lost important documents and you have no way of recovering them.
You can avoid that if you use a company like DRS Imaging Services and have them scan and store all of your documents for you before you do anything else.
In the future, you can go through everything and get rid of the stuff that you don’t need. But, for now, it’s best to keep everything just in case.
Shred Everything
Throwing old documents in the bin is the worst thing you can do. It’s so easy for people to pick those documents out of the bin and potentially steal valuable data about your business and your customers.
So, once you have scanned all of the documents and made copies of them, you need to shred everything.
The transition from paper to digital will happen gradually, so during that interim period, put a clear shredding policy in place to keep on top of document destruction.
Encrypt New Digital Files
When you’re using paper, you can lock sensitive documents in a filing cabinet, which is locked inside the office. Now that you’re taking everything online, you need to put the same security protections in place.
Hopefully, you already have cybersecurity measures in place and you are updating them on a regular basis, but that isn’t enough. You also need to encrypt all of your new digital files.
When files are sent via email and shared in the cloud by your employees, they are at risk of being intercepted. But encryption adds a layer of protection so people can only access the data with a password. If they don’t have the password, it displays as a random, unreadable string of characters.
Even if your cybersecurity systems fail or somebody manages to intercept important emails, the encryption will keep your data safe.
Going paperless has a lot of benefits to your business and it’s definitely something you should consider, especially as the world moves forward and everything becomes digital.
However, it’s not as simple as purchasing cloud services and throwing away all of the printers. You must think carefully about data management throughout the process if you want to avoid headaches in the future.
Image Credit: Pixabay CCO License
