Securing Electronic Records In An Electronic Content Management (ECM) Environment

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems are increasingly emerging as strategic imperatives for organizations and government agencies. These solutions offer a significant number of well-documented business benefits, enabling users to improve productivity and competitive advantage through increased collaboration and content sharing within their organizations. Fast, flexible, secure and centrally-controlled management of business-critical content (including word processing documents, e-mails, spreadsheets, scanned documents, etc.) results in reduced costs, increased operational effectiveness and improved regulatory compliance.

The opportunity to reap these benefits, coupled with the explosive growth of electronic records within every organization, has placed the demand for ECM solutions at an all-time high. The exponential increase in documents originally created as electronic records, those paper-based records that have been converted to electronic format, and the growing legal, statutory and business process requirements concerning the control of these records have necessitated a pragmatic and efficient approach to ECM security.

In light of the issues identified above, organizations and government agencies now require that their ECM solutions provide evidence that can withstand intense legal scrutiny, support strict compliance requirements, and prevent electronic record tampering and internal security breaches. The need for added security functionality is real. According to research conducted by the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information Management, more than 93 percent of all corporate data was being created electronically,1 and more than 80 percent of all security breaches and electronic record tampering occurred inside an organization’s perimeter.