The Basics of Document Security for Marketers
As a marketing professional, your team spends countless hours and resources to create strategy presentations, marketing campaigns and other collateral. Your entire work now resides in just a few documents, whether they are Word files, Excel sheets or PowerPoint presentations, making it crucial they are not lost. Some of these documents, such as quotes, competitive analysis and reports can be of a highly sensitive nature, and your company’s competitiveness and market position may depend on these documents being kept within controlled audiences.
To be productive and complete your work effectively, your documents often need to be shared with others. You may share them internally with colleagues and your sales force, or you may share them externally with partners, customers or channels. And these documents need to be kept safe at all time; at rest (when they are stored) and in transit (when shared with others).
Moreover, wouldn’t it be beneficial if you could still keep full control over these documents after they had been sent? Be able to revoke them? Update them? Prevent them from being printed or forwarded? Unfortunately, one comprehensive tool does not exist to complete all tasks. Let’s review several applications that together can provide you with a comprehensive solution.
First, it is highly recommended that you use an anti-virus and a firewall application. Today, such applications are often bundled together with a bunch of useful security services, such as anti-spyware, and provide comprehensive protection from outside threats. Make sure your software is current; otherwise it might not protect you against the latest threats. Be sure to check out the free solutions that are now available.
Another important consideration is to remember to perform regular backups. Currently there is no need for painstaking manual chores such as burning CDs and DVDs. Online backup has become simple, automatic and affordable, and can solve your storage and recovery problems. Increasingly, online backup is offered with firewall and anti-virus security suites, as well. If you have it, make sure you activate it. Otherwise, you can sign up with any number of online backup services. If you don’t use it, you will be sorry – it is only a matter of time.
When it comes to sharing and collaborating you can use just e-mail, but for more productive work you may wish to consider using an online storage and collaboration service, where you upload your files and share them. These services give you much more storage space, they let you organize and manage multiple shared folders and access your data from anywhere. Some solutions come with a piece of software that automatically syncs your documents to and from the online storage, thus making sharing seamless.
The last piece of the puzzle is keeping control over your important or sensitive documents at all times, and making sure they do not end up in your competitor’s hands as soon as you send them.
Gartner states that 84% of data loss involves authorized parties distributing content externally. Intentionally or unintentionally, the “arrival” of confidential documents to the wrong hands can have devastating effects on a marketing campaign, and on the overall business itself. Whether it is a quote or price list for a customer, or a presentation going to a channel partner, there are new tools available today to restrict the recipients’ ability to view, print, copy or forward these documents, even after you send them. Such tools also allow you to revoke permissions to a document, put watermarks on it, track who views it and essentially give you peace of mind, while allowing you to collaborate and get your work done.
It is highly recommended to make sure you have the full arsenal. It will make you more productive since you will have less downtime as a result of security breaches and data loss, as well as enable your organization to easily and securely share data across your company and the world.
Adi Ruppin is vice president of marketing for Confidela.
