Today`s assets are more informational than physical; compliance is becoming complex and carries heavy consequences. The result is that information security is an ever-increasing concern for every organisation.
In their digital form, most documents are protected by the security measures each organisation has in place. But what happens when the documents flowing through your networks, servers, desktop and mobile computers eventually become hard copy; an eventuality supported by IDC predictions that 4.5 trillion hard-copy pages will be printed in businesses around the world in 2007.
There are proven ways to protect documents at the point of creation and production. Data commonly stored on hard drives can be automatically erased in the process of copying, scanning and Internet faxing. New technologies and services are continually being developed to provide additional support for secure printing and scanning.
But all of this is inside the network. What about the printed documents that walk out the door to pursue a life of their own?
New technologies and services are continually being developed to provide additional support for secure printing and scanning.
Rob Abraham, MD of Bytes Document Solutions
Emerging technology, leading us inexorably closer to the world of smart documents, includes Glossmarks, inexpensive holograms printed on a document to differentiate between copies and originals, thereby helping prevent documents from being forged or illegally reproduced. Similar to a watermark, a Glossmark is easy to see and cannot be deleted or reproduced.
Glossmarks have two major advantages. They do not require additional printing steps or incremental costs and they accommodate variable information.
Similar to Glossmarks, DataGlyphs are like bar codes but much better looking and a great deal more powerful. You can load a DataGlyph with digital information and embed it in a printed document. It tells where the document came from, where it should go when scanned and can reconstruct the document if the original is damaged.
Future possibilities
With the goal of enabling seamless and secure transitioning between the electronic and paper worlds, these security concepts can be taken a step further by embedding RFID (radio frequency identification) into the document workflow.
When this is done, the RFID tag travels everywhere the document goes. It can tell you where the document is, where it has been and what has happened to it along the way. It can even tell you who printed it, and whether it has left the building.
As the document moves from electronic to physical and back again, RFID provides security options unavailable to organisations today.
Data complexity
Adding to the security challenge is the increasing complexity of data storage and retrieval. In the global village of today, data can be stored anywhere from India to Hawaii and all places in between. The question is how to protect privacy while making documents accessible to people with differing need-to-know levels.
Using linguistic and image content analysis to match tagged information is being investigated as a means to ensure that only authorised parties view sensitive data while an unauthorised people do not. Innovation of this nature will result in the secure management of everything from e-mail to electronic invoices, from legal depositions to home loan applications.
It all boils down to smart documents, smart document management and big-I-little-t. It is ultimately about how information flows and the value it carries. It is about documents in all their forms and travels.
Companies embracing smarter documents and smarter document management are finding new ways to do what they are really interested in: creating value and delivering value in their chosen fields. When a document or a document process goes from dumb to smart, it elevates the performance of everything and everyone it touches.
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