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Document Security Lessons From the Panama Papers

April 08, 2016

Blog Document Storage

There’s a good chance that your company doesn’t keep highly sensitive and detailed information of the financial dealings of international politicians, movie stars and sports personalities.

Bu your corporate, customer and employee documents and data are just as important to you and your stakeholders as the Panama Papers are their owners.

The Panama Papers, a series of documents leaked from a Panamanian law firm that contains detailed information of how the world’s wealthy hide their assets from tax collector’s eyes, is the largest document leak in history. To put into scale, the Pentagon Papers, perhaps the first high-profile, top-secret document leak, involved a total of 7,000 documents.

More recently, in 2010, the WikiLeaks release of classified government documents had worldwide ramifications that are still being felt today. At 1.73 gigabytes of date, it was 100 times larger than the Pentagon Papers.

The Panama Papers, which began to be leaked almost two years ago, totaled 2.6 terabytes of documents, emails, database files, etc.. That’s over 1,000% larger than the WikiLeaks release.

How You Can Make Your Documents More Secure

Even if your corporate documents wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as the Panama Papers, their security is crucial for the survival of your business. Here’s how you can protect them.

  1. Do Not Let One Person Have Access to Everything

    When you digitize your documents, you have the ability to determine who sees them. By creating levels of security and allowing access only to those documents that a particular employee needs to do his or her job, you’ll avoid the mass leak of all or most of your secure data by an employee.

  1. Institute a Whistleblower Program

    The Ontario Securities Commission has proposed a policy of rewarding corporate whistleblowers with up to $1.5 million for information. That’s quite an incentive for employees to expose information. To reduce the incentive, you should institute a similar policy within your company so the employees come to you instead of going outside the company.

  1. Maintain a Strong Ethical Foundation

    The best defense against any unwanted whistleblowers is to maintain stringent standards of ethics, transparency and corporate governance and ensure they are at the basis of everything your business does.

The first step to securing your company’s sensitive information starts with the documents themselves. Keeping originals securely stored, while using protected digital versions for day-to-day use, is a good place to start.

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