How Going Paperless Improves Cybersecurity

The goal of information security is to provide for the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information. Confidentiality, availability, and integrity is much more difficult to achieve with paper documents than with digital documents.

Paper documents contain the same sensitive information that a digital document can so why are they more insecure?

• Paper documents are not encrypted
• Paper documents require expensive physical access controls (locks, cameras, rooms), most companies do not have sufficient physical access controls
• Paper documents can be stolen without there being any trace
• Paper documents can be viewed and accessed without there being any record of who viewed or accessed them
• Paper documents are more exposed to environmental factors like fires, floods, and even mold when compared to digital files

By converting paper documents into digital documents you can improve security because you can more easily achieve confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The confidentiality of digital documents can be achieved using encryption and access to them protected with sophisticated access controls. The integrity of digital documents can be verified using hashes and the availability of digital documents can be achieved using offsite backups.

Digital documents can be easily monitored and access can easily be restricted. It isn’t perfect, that is why we always hear about data breaches. Despite that the security benefits provided by digital documents over paper documents is clear.

• Digital documents can be searched
• Digital documents are easier to access
• Communication is faster because you can send documents via email instead of snail mail
• Less administrative costs
• Using digital documents doesn’t require trees to be cut down to make paper