Essential Security Features for a Reliable Document Management System

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Your Document Management Software is the depository of the documents or physical records that are essential for your company. You should have the knowledge of the security aspects that you should look up while selecting the Document Management System for your firm. Data Security is one of the most essential if, not the most important aspect to consider while selecting an adequate DMS.

The data for your company whether in physical or digital form is very crucial for the growth of your business and if they get in the wrong and suspicious hands or if all or parts of the digital documents get cleared out, it could lead to a disaster for your business. You should always give the number one priority to the security aspects of the digital platform whether you are looking for Document Storage Company in India or a DMS.

Here have a keen look at the various security aspects that should be available in a document management system that you are looking out for your organization-

User Access Control

A reliable DMS should have a proper access control module embedded that should allow you to do the following:

Create User and its’ roles: User Roles mean that they are actually profiles of users or employees that an admin can create in the Document management system. Any user role defines the various set of features that are available to that particular user.

Add Users: Authorized users should be able to develop other users and the workforce.

Assign user roles and responsibilities as per the need.

Records Access Control

Authorized users should be able to get a grip over the documents that are available to different users. The Document management system should offer numerous options based on which records access can be controlled. A number of ways that can help in document access can be controlled are as follows:

Folder access: Document management software should have proper control over the folders that are accessible to every user.

Classification: Having an adequate ability to define the confidentiality class of the records is the key feature of document management software. Users should be allocated to a non-disclosure class. Users should not be able to access records having indexing and tagging levels greater than that assigned to users.

A proper grip over what the user can function with the document. The ideal Document management system should have the capacity to access whether the users can view, add/edit data, download, print, modify, update, and share the data in any documents.

Time access: A reliable DMS should have the property to give time-restricted access to the users. Users should not be able to access any of the documents outside the assigned time frame outside office hours.

Data Encryption

Some systems store the records in their own database and others store the data in a file system like server disk or storage devices.

If the records are stored in a particular database then the files are quite secure; as no one can have direct access to the document files. If the Document Management System stores the records in a file system then the records should be stored in an encrypted format. The encrypted documents then can be accessed only through a particular DMS app.

For the instances, which need the files to be decrypted and accessed outside the DMS, the vendor should also give access to a tool for decryption or embedded decryption plugin, which should be available only to authorized users.

IP Address

A reliable Document Management System should allow you to describe the IP addresses for which access is allowed, this list of IP address is called the IP white-list. Associations should not be granted for requests coming from IPs not included in the IP white-list. This will restrict the access to your essential records to users from only authorized environments in your network area.

Log of Activities

A dedicated Document Management System should maintain a systematic and detailed log of all activities done on the software. As we all know systematic logs help in tracking any unexpected incident so that restorative actionable can be taken to prevent such incidents from happening in the further in future. A quarterly review of the logs should be initiated by the authorized users to identify any such incidents.

Backup

A reliable Document Management System should allow admins to take overall backups of the data and the records stored. In case the records are stored in the database, database backups will be taken care of the data as well as the physical documents. In case the records are stored in the file system, then the documents should provide backed up from the stored file system and the database backup will take care of the data itself.

 

Apart from above, the Document management system should also have other security aspects like password expiry, access control of documents within and outside of the DMS, document sharing restriction, alerts, and notifications, etc.