It happens to every business.
Just when an online document is most needed, it can’t be found. Or some data breach indicates your online files have been hacked.
Nowadays, everything is digitized and online, and that tends to make life easier. But it also makes managing documents a serious priority for every business.
To help out, let’s take a look at six common online document management errors, and what steps you can take to avoid them.
1. Poorly Trained Team
Honestly, some of the biggest errors have to do with untrained employees.
Most of the time there’s nothing deliberate or sinister about this at all. It’s just that employees who lack the requisite training are unused to protecting business data.
Luckily, this is an easy fix. Schedule regular training sessions for your employees. The best sessions are taught by data protection experts, who will instruct your employees in how to avoid online document management errors.
2. Not Indexing Your Documents
This is an easy mistake to fix.
A competent document management team will index and organize your company’s online documents. It’s not a difficult task, but it is time-consuming.
There are plenty of document management tools that can help with document indexing, generating names for files, and organizing them in searchable folders. It may not seem like much, but proper indexing is crucial to managing business documents.
3. Not Digitizing Physical Files
Physical documents and files are just as important to your business as the online variety.
The problem with hard copies is that they can be lost, forgotten, destroyed, or simply degrade over time. Plus, they can be tough to secure—at least with the same degree of protection afforded by online document management.
Digitizing physical documents isn’t as difficult and laborious as it used to be. It’s easy to scan document images and upload them into a .Net PDF library, where they can be viewed and edited at leisure.
4. Using In-House File Storage
It makes complete sense for a small business to prefer in-house file storage solutions.
It saves on costs, and it makes things much easier. But this isn’t a sensible long-term document management strategy. Outsourcing document storage to a dedicated, professional outfit is a better option, even if it means spending a little more money.
5. No Data Backup Plan
Not having a data backup plan is one of the worst online document management errors you can make.
And this is especially true nowadays when there are a plethora of easy cloud-based storage systems to keep your documents safe and sound. Cloud storage solutions also include unlimited space, and document and data retrieval is a cinch should the worst-case scenario happen.
6. Unsecured Data Transfer
Finally, you shouldn’t overlook proper methods of data transfer.
This is a weak link that savvy cybercriminals often exploit. Perform an audit to understand how your employees are transferring documents online and between computers. Make sure they’re using secure and reliable data transfer protocols; otherwise, you could be looking at a serious data breach sooner or later.
Avoid These Common Online Document Management Errors
It doesn’t take much to manage online documents in a way that is both organized and secure.
The first step is to recognize these common online document management errors and do everything in your power to avoid them. Along the way, you’ll find that your business benefits in many unexpected ways.
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