Audit Trail – Security Control and Transparency at Your Fingertips

Physical mail has been around forever. In a world that has largely gone digital over the past thirty years, the United States Postal Service still delivers over 25 billion pieces of business to business (B2B) mail every year. Today more than ever, digitizing your mail is an essential step in optimizing and securing your business functions to keep pace with the rapidly changing work environment. What is a digital audit trail and how does it support security control?

Table of contents:

• What is digital audit trail and how does it support the security of digital mailroom?
• What are the challenges and solutions?
• The takeaway

What is digital audit trail and how does it support the security of digital mailroom?

With physical mail, you have very little control over mail delivery, compliance, and security. It’s laden with bottlenecks, hidden costs and, during the ongoing pandemic, creates added health risks for your employees. Conversely, digital mail offers efficiency, convenience and heightened audit trail security control. State-of-the-art digital mail systems provide instant global delivery, remote collaboration, document encryption, automated audit trails and multiple levels of authentication to simplify remote work while mitigating threats to operational security.

Physical mail often includes personally-identifying information (PII) that are subject to the same regulations as electronic data. Yet, many organizations don’t have the right systems or processes in place to maintain compliance of all physical documents. Digital mail distribution and processing systems solve this problem by initiating automated security audit trails as soon as a piece of mail is received and not waiting until the content in each piece of mail makes its way into a transactional system. This level of transparency provides full visibility into all mail operations and solves the compliance gap created by physical mail.

With physical mail, compliance processes need to continually be updated as products, documents, and workflows evolve and grow. Digital mail systems can eliminate this problem by automatically tracking every action taken by every user on every document.

What are the challenges and solutions?

Pre-pandemic, Varonis reported that almost 41% of US-based companies allowed employees unrestricted access to sensitive information. For many companies, the rapid pivot to remote work has almost certainly increased both unrestricted access and the security risks that come with it.  Physical supervision is largely impossible, managing access at the system level may no longer be adequate and distributing documents via email is difficult to control.  Digital mail distribution and processing systems solve this problem by implementing both automated audit trails and document level entitlements – ensuring only authorized personnel can engage with sensitive information.

In the event of a breach, audit trails allow regulators or system administrators to quickly identify the “bad actor” and understand which assets were compromised. Administrators can then view the actions taken in association with compromised assets – informing the path ahead and minimizing system disturbance. Auditing capabilities demonstrate an organizational commitment to security, reducing the opportunity for misuse and harm against sensitive information.

A lesser-known feature of security audit trails is its KPI functionality. Organizations maintain predetermined service level agreements that drive them towards improved customer service outcomes. Audit trails enable administrators to monitor these benchmarks with transparency into how long mail has remained unopened, how many people have viewed it and how many pieces of similar material have been ingested. The system can urge administrators to act on un-opened content – reducing swirl mail and improving upon customer service metrics.

The takeaway

Digital audit trail functionality has many benefits – security, transparency, and compliance. By enabling organizations to control their transactional processes, track progress and monitor outcomes – audit trails empower more secure and better-performing business operations. In a post-pandemic workforce, the need for security and transparency will only continue to increase. Consider adopting an audit trail process to maintain resilience and safety for your organization.

Want to learn how to improve your workflow integration, efficiency, and security? Check out our blog!

About Eco-Mail: Eco-Mail is the leading enterprise software provider that digitizes an organization’s mail. Our solution eliminates sorting in the mailroom and physical delivery to recipients facilitates remote work by both individuals and groups. In addition to tremendous cost savings, Eco-Mail streamlines operations; improves process, audit and compliance controls; and allows businesses to be more flexible and responsive. Downstream scanning, duplication, and interoffice mail are virtually eliminated. 2020 marked the mass shift to remote, hybrid and open-office work calling on organizations to commit to innovation, accessibility and collaboration. While organizations have gone remote — their mail has not.