Research shows that business documents are the most exposed type of data. In fact, one report showed that, in one month, employees exposed an average of 22 files per day!

How can you prevent these issues from affecting your business (and customers or clients)?

Document Automation is one of the most effective strategies to secure your organization’s documents and ensure compliance with the latest regulations.

Here are some of the top security-related reasons to utilize document automation:

1. Secure Document Storage

Document Automation solutions allow more straightforward transitions from databases to other storage solutions. For example, after automatically creating a document, you can use automation processes to file it in a specific storage repository such as Microsoft SharePoint (without additional user input).

Put another way, document automation saves you from having to download documents to transfer them between systems. By skipping this step, you reduce the likelihood of information being leaked or misplaced.

2. Standardized Compliant Documents

Some documents cannot and should not be changed, such as legal contracts and government forms. When it comes to these documents, your organization must have a process for standardizing them and ensuring they turn out the same every single time they’re created or shared.

Pre-made templates make it easy to standardize sensitive documents and avoid issues with formatting, leaving out essential information, etc.

3. Minimized Manual Entry Errors

No matter how skilled your team is, mistakes can happen. Human error is inevitable, but it can be significantly reduced with help from document automation.

Document automation processes make certain mistakes almost impossible to make. For example, do you need documents with different clauses depending on a customer’s reigion? Document automation tools allow dynamic content to be easily inserted based on information in your CRM or ERP, so you’ll always be able to send the right language to the right place.

4. Document Replication

Document automation is based on specific and clearly defined rules, which create repeatable processes for document creation, storage, etc. It also makes it easier for you to reproduce documents without worrying about essential information being left out or incorrect (and potentially sensitive) information being included where it shouldn’t be.

5. User Access and Authorizations

User access and authorizations restrict users to the lowest level of system access required to complete a specific task. These user roles help to limit the number of people who have access to certain information, which reduces the risk of it falling into the wrong hands.

When you rely on document automation solutions, it’s easy to apply user restrictions and set strict rules regarding who has access to what. You can make the rules as strict or lax as possible, and you can trust that your document automation tool will abide by them.

Enhancing Security in Document Automation

You can experience the security benefits of document automation and reduce security risks by implementing the proper protocols. Here are some of the most important factors to keep in mind to enhance security in your document automation processes:

Security

Of course, security should be a top priority for you and your team. A role-based security model gives you more control over who has access to which documents, who can send them to others, etc. By establishing specific roles and clarifying who is allowed to do what, you can increase the security of your document automation process and make it more effective.

Privacy

Privacy is also critical to an effective document automation process. Make sure you remove sensitive data and generated documents immediately after flow execution and configure a clean-up service for transactional data.

Taking steps like these will ensure sensitive data only passes through those who are authorized to view and work with it. It will also prevent the storage of data (such as transactional data) that could potentially be compromised in the future.

Security Features in Automation to Consider

When searching for document automation solutions, pay careful attention to their security features. The following are some of the most beneficial ones to look for:

• Configurable business rules to support jurisdiction-specific variations
• Automated policy and legal changes
• E-signature solutions
• The ability to create translated versions of templates to comply with language regulations
• The ability to dynamically insert canned language

These features will not only provide additional security and peace of mind, but they also help to standardize your document management processes and ensure you’re always providing the most up-to-date, accurate documents to clients, colleagues, business partners and anyone else who relies on them.