Digital technology is now completely integrated into our lives. We cannot think of a time when we weren’t using digital technology to run our businesses. Nowadays, we even run our homes using this technology. Thanks to it, businesses have more opportunities to grow and develop themselves. One of the ways that it has helped us is by digitizing our documents and making it easier to send and receive documents from anywhere in fractions of a second. But where it has given us a lot of benefits, there are also some drawbacks that have come with it.
The Threats
There are numerous threats that are hanging over our heads like ‘phishing’, ‘scamming’, ‘forgery’, ‘counterfeiting’, but the biggest one among them all is document fraud. Document fraud is fast becoming one of the largest criminal industry in the world. In 2016, 64 percent of decision makers in businesses said that their agendas include the management of document frauds. Yet only one out of three businesses were working on solutions to detect document frauds and manage them. Document Fraud
All our documentation is now digital, which means that document fraud is everywhere. It is threatening every part of our businesses whether we receive contracts from clients, receipts from vendors, or candidate information from recruitment agencies. And sadly, all these documents are floating around the World Wide Web totally unprotected.
Hardly any transaction in any business takes place without some type of document being generated for it. The quantity of business documents flowing in and out of a business is continuously growing and the risks related to document management are growing right alongside them. Business owners and managers are feeling the need to take steps to ensure their authenticity more than ever.
Common Misconception
Sadly, the more common, knee-jerk reaction so far has been to stay away from it all. Mistakenly believing the myth that manual paper documentation is safer and more secure than digital documents, many businesses have, so far, been very keen to insist on it. However, there is no proof that paper documents are in any way more authentic than digital ones. In fact, paper documents have more chances of being copied, scanned, edited, or retouched than digital documents. The fact here that no business can escape from is that whether paper or digital, there are major risks to documents flowing in and out of our companies and we need to accept that.
Good News
Don’t let the risks and problems of document security bring you down. It’s not all doom and gloom. There is good news aplenty. It’s that there are excellent solutions for you out there than can help you greatly reduce the risks. These include tools for ensure the authenticity of the documents that are coming in, making sure that the document can only be seen by the person who it was meant for, and document security solutions that ensure that no one else interferes with the documents at all. These solutions can greatly help you minimize the risks of document fraud.
The first step however, is to make sure that the decision makers of businesses fully understand the risks and threats that are abound in the digital world. And they, as well as the staff, are up to date on how to reduce these risks.
