Have you found yourself tearing your hair out trying to ensure GDPR compliance? Your time could be better spent on other areas of your business. In this article, we look at the 3 main reasons document scanning can help to ensure GDPR compliance.
1 – Document security and privacy
Paper documents are far easier to steal, replicate or lose. Digital documents, even when stored on a basic filing system can be secured with passwords and the data can be digitally encrypted. This in itself should be enough to take the step towards document digitisation.
2 – Data search
Article 17 in the GDPR is Right to erasure (“right to be forgotten”). It states, “The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay.”
Paper documents are far harder to find and the contents within them even harder. First you have to find every document that relates to this person, secondly you have to find all the relevant pages and then you have to redact and replicate these.
With digital documents, this process will be straightforward, particularly if your digital documents have been OCR’d (this means text within a document can be searched). The time savings for doing this digitally are huge.
Critically the GDPR legislation states “without undue delay” twice in two sentences. How much of a delay would you have if you were working with paper documents? Perhaps the documents are stored off site, or they are in badly organised boxes in a basement? Other rights included in the GDPR are right of access, right to rectification and right to restriction of processing. All of these will be far easier to comply with for companies working digitally. Once again, the case for working with digital documents becomes very strong.
3 – Data retention
Data retention is far easier with digital documents, in fact with the right software in place data retention can be set and controlled by a set of rules automatically. Without a data retention policy, a data breach would be more likely to be regarded as serious if no old data has been deleted, if there is no data retention policy or if no thought had been given to whether data should be deleted.
Scanning your documents is one of the best steps a business can take to make GDPR compliance a breeze. If you’d like to get a quote for digitising your documents, contact us today.