There are a myriad of security articles available on line; most are as dull as dish water and as dry as the Gobi desert. Fear not, this article will be short and pithy and was written having read an article by Steven Li, CTO of Foxit Software which got me thinking. A few moments of your time perusing this note could be a game changer in the future.
While security challenges like massive data breaches, global virus attacks, ransomware and vulnerabilities may be grabbing headlines in today’s threat discussions, malicious hackers and other cybercriminals are not the only culprits when it comes to security leaks. Today's security breaches very often come from within: from employees, business partners and customers who accidently or intentionally expose sensitive information. The confidential information resides in the omnipresent data container known as the document.
In an age of information firewalls, intrusion detection, network access control, authentication and other security fortifications, the simple document is increasingly a critical area of security vulnerability for everything from employee, customer and financial data, intellectual property, confidential business agreements, legal records and more.
What’s needed is a whole new approach to document security that can address some of the inherent vulnerabilities of documents in the digital age.
The digital document should be updated in ways that makes it more trackable, controllable and secure. Specifically, by embedding documents with an identity and connecting them in the cloud, businesses can gain much more control over their documents and confidential data sometimes contained in them – even after a document leaves the premises.
A truly connected document can be remotely recalled, erased or redacted in all of its connected instances after it’s sent. Think about it: A document containing confidential trade secrets is accidentally sent to a competitor via email. With a connected document, a company, recognising its mistake, could quickly disable the document as long as it is online somewhere.
Or imagine a document is widely in circulation and it’s discovered that the information contained therein is incorrect or damaging to the company. The originator of that document could correct the mistake in every online instance of the document anywhere in the world.
Today, the preferred format for documents is the PDF; it was not created for a connected world. Updating that technology to achieve a more secure and controllable document for the Internet Age is essential to overcoming one of today’s biggest security vulnerabilities.
