Organizations are receiving more information than ever from more sources than ever, and they're being asked to push that information faster than ever to more corners of the organization than ever. It's no surprise that crooks and fraudsters, whether they're inside your organization or outside their organization, are looking for ways to get at that information for nefarious purposes.
2016 was a wakeup call for organizations of all sizes when it comes to compliance and information security. We saw on the front pages of our daily newspaper's stories about massive data leaks. In some cases, this was lost patient records. In others, espionage. In some cases, it was retailers losing their credit card information that they were safeguarding on behalf of their valued customers.
All of this means significant internal cost, huge reputational risk, and in some cases, regulatory fines. Some organizations will never be able to get back to where they were before these breaches happened. Organizations have to take greater care in managing their information. It's not just enough to digitize. It's not just enough to add a workflow to route information around your organization. You must find ways to safeguard it from the cradle to the grave.
And what's at risk here? The most critical asset your organization has is information; customer information, intellectual property, financial records, and project documents. A breach in any one of these areas can have a tremendous trickle-down effect that can literally destroy an organization. How big an impact can this have? We've seen retailers who were impacted by data breaches which have lost billions of dollars in fines, technology costs, and lost revenues. And they're still today trying to get out from under this. You better believe that the crooks are looking for ways to infiltrate your organization. It's not a matter of "if", it's a matter of "when".
This is not the end of the story when it comes to compliance and risk, because not only do you have to safeguard that information, you have to ensure that you're doing it a manner that's compliant with the rules and regulations set out by governing bodies as well as your internal auditors.
Today there more than 14,000 federal, state, and industry laws, standards, and regulations, all about the management of information. There are people in Washington D.C. and elsewhere whose job it is to think up more of these regulations. We need to not only digitize information; we need to find a way to make the management of that information better than ever.
49% of organizations believe that unauthorized access by internal staff poses the biggest risk to your data.
Most organizations have antiquated document scanning and capture systems that are creating five key vulnerabilities. These are the types of vulnerabilities that lead to huge compliance violations and those scary data breaches.
This post is based on a presentation by industry analyst Mark Brousseau on a recent AIIM webinar called "How to Plan Your Information Management Strategy." Mark Brousseau is a noted marketer, analyst, speaker, and writer with more than twenty years of experience advising leading providers of payments and document automation solutions. He is President of Brousseau and Associates, a full-service marketing PR and business development firm specializing in the payments and document automation arenas. You can view the original webinar here: