Sensitive company documents: protect them with digital watermarking

Every company, whatever its sector, handles a certain amount of sensitive and confidential data. That information has to be protected closely, particularly where competition in the sector runs high. The risks of it being hacked or stolen are considerable, hence the need to take suitable protective measures and, above all, to use tools that keep those documents inviolable. Protecting and keeping certain data confidential is in some cases a legal obligation, and it reassures consumers and suppliers alike about how the company secures what it holds. Digital watermarking is one option for protecting data. It is a tool that ensures the traceability of documents, and even of the organisation's database if need be. Here is more about the technique and what it offers.

Why watermark confidential documents?

In 2019, 24% of companies suffered a data loss over the course of the year, an incident that cost them an average of 448,916 euros. Beyond the financial loss, it also causes unplanned downtime. The study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and commissioned by IBM also showed that the average cost of a data breach in France stands at 3.65 million euros. Figures from the University of Maryland show that a cyberattack takes place every 39 seconds, which gives some sense of the risk companies handling sensitive data are running. The Herjavec Group estimates that a company will suffer a ransomware attack every 11 seconds. A study by Varonis likewise shows that only 5% of company data is properly protected, and that 62% of breaches not caused by human error or mishandling are down to credential theft, phishing and brute force. Only 27% of data breaches are caused by human error, according to statistics published by IBM. Verizon reports that 28% of data breach victims are small companies, figures that show every organisation is exposed to this problem whatever its size.

How do you identify the sensitive and confidential documents to protect in a company?

The nature and the list of sensitive and confidential documents depend on what the organisation does and how large it is. Generally, a document is considered confidential when it contains personal data (name, address, social security number, email address, phone number and so on) or strategic information. A document's confidential nature can also be defined by regulation itself. There are data protection laws and other regulations governing how data is managed in a professional setting, and they place a legal obligation on organisations to protect the data of their clients and employees through a confidentiality process. That also means setting retention periods and rules for destroying archives.

Which company documents are sensitive and confidential?

Among a company's confidential and sensitive documents you will find:

• Financial documents such as credit and debit account statements, credit applications, and information about financial and property transactions.
• Documents relating to the organisation's commercial strategy : profit and loss accounts, trade secrets, intellectual property documents, tax information and so on.
• Invoices, confidential correspondence, contact details, shipping labels and the like.
• Assorted documents carrying information about management, research and development, human resources data, accounting records, sales and marketing documents, and information about suppliers and partners.

Digital watermarking: how does it work?

Digital watermarking is one of the options you can adopt to secure the company's confidential data. Long used for images and photographs, watermarking can now be applied to digital documents. In principle, it involves inserting or concealing, imperceptibly, a protective message inside a host medium: the document itself or the database it is stored in. The protection covers copyright, traceability (by hiding the identifiers of one or several users inside the host medium), the integrity of the document, and so on. Watermarking therefore lets you open the document or the host medium while protecting it through that hidden message. The protection is independent of the storage format and does not get in the way of normal use.

NetExplorer protects your data with document watermarking built into the platform

NetExplorer positions itself as an expert in secure file storage and sharing. We have strengthened our services by signing a partnership with WaToo, a startup specialising in digital data watermarking. Our platform also offers cloud storage and file sharing for professionals, through infrastructure we control and host in data centres in the Paris region. NetExplorer and WaToo offer a reversible watermarking solution, which guarantees the watermark can be removed from the document and the host medium recovered. In practice, documents distributed through NetExplorer can be marked visibly or invisibly on the fly, which means the trace and the watermark can be extracted in the event of a leak, and the link or the access blocked to prevent unauthorised distribution.