The January 2012 issue of ENX Magazine features an article titled “Profiting by Helping Your Customers Get Through the Document & Data Security Noise” written by Dave Anastasi, CEO of eDocument Sciences.
In this article Dave looks at how companies need to focus on what their customers care about, not what they care about. As many others have said, customers don’t care about you and your products. They care about their business.
Helping them navigate through the challenging world of data and document security will benefit them tremendously. With the constant headlines of data breaches and breakdowns in company security, you owe it to your customers to help them survive the constant onslaught.
Click on the link below to read the article in its entirety.
Profiting by Helping Your Customers Get Through the Document & Data Security Noise
I grew up around the advertising business. My dad was an advertising executive who ran the creative departments for the two largest advertising agencies in New England. He won many awards and still today has a prestigious award named after him, even though he passed away over 25 years ago. He represented clients like John and Robert Kennedy, Wang, Lotus, John Hancock, Spaulding, Red Sox, Bruins and Celtics as well as many other organizations.
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Todays headlines point to hackers and other criminals as the major causes of data breaches, but in fact a lot of the trouble starts with trusted employees. And one of the most trusted in your life is your doctor.
Recent reports by Manhattan Research have found that 81% of physicians use a smartphone, up from 72% in 2010. 30% of doctors use iPads to access electronic health records and communicate with patients. Unfortunately according to research by the Ponemon Institute, data breaches have risen 32% with 96% of all health care organizations surveyed experiencing at least one data breach in the past two years.
The report did not specify the percentage of breaches from mobile devices, but it stated, “Widespread use of mobile devices is putting patient data at risk.” Larry Ponemon, commenting on his first study of patient privacy and data security, said, “This year it seems the issue of mobile devices has ratcheted up, because the adoption rate of smartphones that are really smart, or tablet computers, seems to have increased significantly.”
Mobile devices create security risks in two ways. Data can reside on the device and someone using the device can access medical records at health care organizations. Any document or piece of data that contains personally identifiable information (PII) is at risk. Plus it’s easier to lose a smartphone than a laptop.
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I had a conversation with an attorney the other day and she was telling me how her law firm is getting Apple iPads for all the attorneys. She said there was a lot of resistance, at first, from her IT department. That’s been the case with many law firms, but improved productivity has won the day.
In fact, according to the 2011 ILTA/InsideLegal Technology Purchasing Survey, which examined the purchasing trends of law firms with 50+ Attorneys, 25% of respondents said that the iPad would be one of the major technology purchases over the next 12 months. 11% of firms had already purchased iPads for their attorneys and 55% reported providing IT support for employees who purchase and use their personal devices.
Many law firms and other businesses are concerned about leaking the most sensitive information in their business. As with many organizations, law firms use documents to store client and case materials. Some of them are in a case management system, but many are on people’s laptops, desktops, mobile devices and file servers. I asked the attorney what would happen if those documents got out of the company and into the hands of other law firms, the media or other businesses? She said it would be devastating. Letting her client correspondence, legal briefs and strategies out would ruin them. Their clients would lose all trust in them and it would most likely put them out of business.
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It’s been over 11 years since President Clinton signed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN) into law in the United States, yet there are still people and businesses who question the legality of electronic signatures. This is not as crazy as it sounds, because like many things in the US, state and local laws govern many business transactions. So don’t be surprised if you are confused.
A case in point is a recent change in New York state law that affects real estate transactions. On September 23, 2011, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law a bill that authorizes the electronic recording of documents or instruments affecting real property. These can be digitized images of the original, executed paper instruments or electronically executed instruments. This adds onto the existing New York state Electronic Signatures and Records Act (ESRA), which already allowed documents signed electronically to be received, accepted, recorded and stored by government entities in an electronic format. ESRA clarified that electronic signatures are just as binding as hand-written signatures.
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Last March I wrote about locking your computer so people don’t steal your data. In the post there’s a great video about one way to do that. It’s a bit severe, but funny.
A lot of us don’t take the time to lock our computers, because we forget or maybe we don’t think anyone will try to steal anything. That’s a false hope, because there are too many people who will steal a laptop, phone or tablet computer, whether they want the data or not.
If you aren’t good about locking your computer, you should lock your files. There are simple ways, like putting a password on a Microsoft Word document or a PDF. Password protecting a file will stop the casual person from getting your data, but it won’t stop anyone with a little sophistication or a criminal. There are too many file cracking tools on the internet to break into password protected files. Most of them are billed as password recovery tools, since this is a legitimate action for people to take.
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