Even before achieving the goal of reducing storage costs, companies have realized the need to create a complete enterprise document management strategy. It is not enough to want to eliminate paper, you have to organize your house to achieve the benefits.
Thus, the need arises for companies to develop an enterprise information management. In other words, a set of processes and practices used to manage documents created from an organization’s data.
To help with this, information technology has facilitated the secure and controlled handling of documents. Ultimately, the goal of this article is to understand how all this works. Let’s go?
The Importance of Corporate Records Management
The importance of corporate document management has grown in recent years. This growth occurs as compliance requirements increase.
In addition, improving document management systems and strategies is becoming increasingly important in business operations.
The reduction of storage costs has not been put aside because of the demands. However, companies have learned that this important benefit has become a consequence of improving business processes.
A corporate document management system allows a company and its users to create a document or capture a hard copy in electronic form. With this, organizations now have the ability to:
- Create;
- Storage;
- Edit;
- Print;
- Edit;
- Manage documents in image, video and audio, as well as text format.
The relationship with reducing storage costs begins to emerge when companies start to have a technological structure that can include:
- Scanners for document capture;
- Printers for hard copy creation;
- Storage devices;
- Computer programs and servers for managing the databases that contain the documents.
This changes the management of the administration of digital content throughout its entire life cycle. In other words, we are talking from the creation to the permanent storage or deletion of the files.
From this point on, it is possible to simplify access, eliminate bottlenecks, optimize security, maintain integrity, minimize overhead, and consequently reduce storage costs.
Document Management in the Context of Compliance
As for regulatory compliance, corporate records management should address the following steps within a development cycle:
- How documents are created, organized, indexed, protected, preserved, authenticated, and recovered in the event of a disaster;
- How long they should be retained;
- Where they should be stored;
- How changes can be tracked.
In general, for corporate document management systems a central location is created in order to maintain documents and provide workflow tools to control any modification or other work done on them.
Examples of compliance requirements for document management
Corporate records management requirements vary depending on which laws or regulations pertain to a particular industry.
Some associations have established document management standards independent of state or federal regulations.
Some of the best known examples of compliance for document management:
- Sarbanes-Oxley Act;
In addition, associations associated with brokerage houses and the stock exchange make certain requirements. After all, companies that provide financial services must use an electronic storage system capable of preserving, retrieving, and reproducing records.
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What is the role of IT in document management?
IT underpins corporate document management, along with the training, processes, and procedures that underpin an overall compliance effort.
As with any successful approach to regulatory compliance and also in the quest to reduce storage costs, IT departments must work with all parts of the business.
This means that there is a joint work with strategic areas, such as legal, financial, human resources, among others. All this to create the most effective and strategic corporate document management environment.
The importance of the digital signature in the document management process
As you know, digital signature is the technique used to validate the authenticity and integrity of a message, software, or digital document. Therefore, it is part of the document management process.
At this stage of document management, a digital signature is intended to solve tampering and representation problems in digital communications.
Thus, digital signatures can provide the additional guarantees of evidence of origin, identity, and status in electronic media. These qualities apply to documents, transactions, and messages as well as to the acknowledgement of informed consent by the signer.
It is worth pointing out that a digital signature can be used with any type of message or document, whether encrypted or not, serving simply so that the recipient can be sure of the sender’s identity and that the message has arrived intact.
In the case of documents digital signatures make it difficult for the signer to deny having signed something (non-repudiation), assuming that his private key has not been compromised, since the digital signature is unique for both (document and signer) and unites them.
A digital certificate is an electronic document that contains the digital signature of the certificate issuing authority, binds a public key to an identity, and can be used to verify that a public key belongs to a specific person or entity.
Finally the reduction of storage costs
Once you have put your house in order, it is time to reap the results. After all, in addition to an efficient process and strategic document management, the company achieves other types of benefits.
The reduction in storage costs is realized from the moment you know exactly which files need to be stored, updated, backed up, authenticated via digital signature, etc.
Therefore, as was said at the very beginning of the article, reducing storage costs becomes really efficient and strategic when it is associated with a document management process, leading not only to savings, but to a series of other benefits.
How is your company managing documents and applying good security practices, such as digital signatures, for example? Has it achieved storage cost reduction efficiently?
Finally, another important point to be considered is the cost of searching for the information, where a software can quickly find the scanned document and is also a guarantee that it will be found, since many companies have considerable losses due to not finding a physically stored document.
About Eval
A EVAL está a mais de 18 anos desenvolvendo projetos nos segmentos financeiro, saúde, educação e indústria, Desde 2004, oferecemos soluções de Autenticação, Assinatura Eletrônica e Digital e Proteção de Dados. Atualmente, estamos presente nos principais bancos brasileiros, instituições de saúde, escolas e universidades, além de diferentes indústrias.
Com valor reconhecido pelo mercado, as soluções e serviços da EVAL atendem aos mais altos padrões regulatórios das organizações públicas e privadas, tais como o SBIS, ITI, PCI DSS, e a LGPD. Na prática, promovemos a segurança da informação e o compliance, o aumento da eficiência operacional das empresas, além da redução de custos.
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