Information security
Protecting your information starts with knowing what you have, where it’s located and the potential risk it could pose to your business. Turning raw data into classified, searchable, and actionable information enables you to uncover insights that empower better decision-making and implement appropriate levels of protection.
Information governance
Maintaining control of your information to maximize operations, safeguard against threats and ensure regulatory and legal compliance requires an overarching policy and program based on international standards. Information governance is the orchestration of creation, collection, management, retention and disposition of information across an organization.
The development of compliant information governance policies requires expertise from certified professionals, with practical guidelines developed to meet the needs of your business. Information governance services support organizations in meeting security policies and achieving compliance with a variety of federal, provincial, and industry regulations — including the ability to audit, demonstrate and defend compliance efficiently.
Every transaction between an organization and their stakeholders produces a trail of data. This may be highly sensitive, as with personally identifiable information (PII) or payment card industry (PCI) information, requiring security, privacy, and discovery controls. Other data has no value and simply takes up space, commonly referred to as ROT (redundant, obsolete or trivial) data. It is estimated that ROT data accounts for a minimum of 25-30% of an organization’s data, with other sources saying it can be much higher.
Unstructured data is information that hasn’t been organized into a traditional, structured database format, which means it isn’t accessible, tracked, or leveraged for business insights. Without managing your repository — most of which is unstructured — you’re at risk of storing high quantities of ROT data and exposing your organization to risk and vulnerability if breached.
Unstructured data is a key contributor to security breaches, privacy violations, high IT costs, and compliance penalties. When considering cybersecurity, unstructured data is often the low-hanging fruit cyber criminals will target to gain access to deeper systems. They are looking for things they can monetize, such as names, addresses, dates of birth, social security numbers, passwords, credit card numbers, banking information, or contracts. Unfortunately, this sensitive data is often found throughout the infrastructure, making it difficult to track and keep secured.
Here are four key areas to mitigate risk through information governance
1. Records and information management program
Implementing a records information management (RIM) program ensures organizations can comply with regulatory and legal requirements while improving efficiency in access to information. Proper RIM practices, supported by a secured platform, help protect information through secure storage, access controls, encryption and audit trails, reducing the risk of security and privacy breaches. It’s essential to establish governance policies, developed with certified records management experts, that encompass information across the organization, supported by practices and technologies that enable governance through the entire lifecycle, from collection to storage to disposition. By doing so, organizations can safeguard against breaches and maintain the integrity and confidentiality of critical data while bolstering trust and reliability.
2. File analysis and classification tools
AI-based technology to categorize or index your documents so the data can then be easily extracted, exported, accessed, and protected. Implementing a system to classify your data can strengthen your security by reducing ROT data assets, proactively managing the lifecycle of your data, and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations. Data discovery also remediates data by restricting access, encrypting, archiving, redacting, or moving sensitive data to secured locations.
It can also transform data generated from various physical and digital workflows into intelligence to enable better decision-making, more responsive customer service, and efficient operations. Ricoh security and process specialists have a deep understanding of information generated from print, mail and digital workflows as well as archiving and email security, so the right approach is applied when classifying your data.
3. Expert-driven policy and implementation
Establishing an information governance policy with leadership-level endorsement provides a structured framework of controls and measures to effectively direct how information is handled. Governance helps mitigate organizational risk and ensures technologies and behaviours comply with legal and regulatory requirements. Once policies and guidelines are put in place, effective data protection procedures can be enacted across people, processes and technologies.
Policies should cover information and records management, privacy controls and data security. Organizational guidelines will set out the procedures, workflows and safeguards through operational manuals and communications, with roles and responsibilities clearly outlined. A regular cadence for training is necessary as operations and regulations evolve. Enabling technologies can be implemented to enact controls, automate processes and measure, track and report outcomes.
4. Data lifecycle management policies and procedures
This security best practice seeks to mitigate an organization’s risk through the management of data, including sensitive and valuable information throughout the entire information lifecycle. Ricoh professional services and managed services teams can assist in any step of this process. Retention and disposal policies and procedures determine the lifecycle and handling of different classes of data.
Retention policies can determine when and how data is moved from your active repositories into an archived state, moved into an off-site cloud repository, or expunged from systems as warranted by policy. Services for end-of-life disposal encompass cleansing data from multifunction devices to ensure that the NVRAM and drives of retired customer devices are wiped clean before disposal.
Business process automation
Inbound information
Inbound information such as email, mail, web form submissions, document scans, and e-commerce must be received and handled securely for any business process automation initiative. Integrating them with secured, automated workflows helps ensure data is safe and assists with information governance and compliance. Digitized data requires focused protection from the point of origin and throughout its lifecycle.
Digital and scanned documents, fax transmissions, form submissions, captured images, and other data enter your organization’s systems through various methods, which warrants scrutiny of how you protect that valuable information.
Automating data capture, classification, extraction, and export can accelerate the flow of information, providing convenient access to those who need it. Controlling and governing access to information — especially sensitive information in digital formats — requires formidable security capabilities across multiple touchpoints.
Sensitive data can be personally identifiable information (PII), proprietary, intellectual property (IP), or fiduciary, among others, and can lead to hefty fines if not safeguarded. However, if the data is to be protected, it must be transformed from unstructured data into actionable, structured data. Let’s explore how the following areas can protect your valuable data.
Intelligent document capture processes
Intelligent capture solutions transform documents into a structured, secured format so data can be exported into any workflow, application, or repository, such as ERP, ECM, CRM, RPA, iPaaS, analytics, or line of business system.
The documents must first be digitized or scanned. During the scanning process, authentication methods validate authorized users and administrators can lock down access to certain processes — even limiting what users can see — to prevent improper use. You can also protect converted files with permission settings and password control.
Most intelligent capture solutions do not store data; they simply pass the digitally transformed data through to other applications or repositories. Since information can be vulnerable to compromise if intercepted, security measures are used to protect data in use. Cloud services also make use of built-in encryption, decryption and authentication, as well as use Transport Layer Security (TLS) for transmission.
Outbound information
Securely managing large volumes of data while complying with regulatory controls and audits can be daunting. However, with the right technology and security in place to protect your data, remote and hybrid business processes and information can be optimized for growth and scalability.
How do you achieve this while ensuring your data is protected from outside threats, internal security breaches (accidental or deliberate), data loss, or compliance violations?
1. Controlled print output
Multifunction printers bring efficient output to multiple users, along with the capability to protect printed information. Whether printing from desktop computers or mobile devices, outputting sensitive information remains in the authorized person’s control. In addition, full-featured cost control tracking and chargeback provide comprehensive accountability of user behaviour and a way to identify out-of-the-ordinary patterns or abuse.
2. Secured document release
By incorporating Secured Document Release, sensitive information sent to centralized print servers or cloud services will not be picked up by mistake or by anyone seeking to steal confidential information. Instead of submitted print jobs going directly to a device, they are encrypted and held in the originating user’s print queue on a secured server or in the cloud.
The user can only release a print job when they are present at and logged into the device of their choice. The print queue can reside on-premises or in the cloud, and print data can be sent over a secured web connection and encrypted in transit.
- 1IDC. “High Data Growth and Modern Applications Drive New Storage Requirements in Digitally Transformed Enterprises,” July 2022.