PDF Document Security: A Major Enabler of Digital Process and Digital Transformation

The pandemic from the past year has accelerated adoption of digital transformation in companies. That means virtual collaboration, the minimization of paper used in business processes, and remote access to company applications are all areas of importance. Two-thirds of businesses say that their requirements for paperless office processes have increased in the last year.

The most popular file format for supporting digital office processes is Adobe’s PDF.

Frank Kettenstock, chief marketing officer of Foxit Software, said that “paper was already becoming passé in many organizations, but this pandemic has dramatically accelerated its demise. PDF editing and associated technologies, such as e-signature solutions, have become essential to the way people work and conduct business. As with many other changes hastened by Covid-19, the shift away from paper and toward more digital PDF processes will have a lasting effect on organizations around the world.”

What are the ways that PDF documents can be secured?

Encryption. Using either password for certificate encryption, PDF documents can be locked to unauthorized users and permissions can be set for what operations others are allowed to perform on the document, like printing, modifying the file contents, or copying annotations.

Redaction. This is the removal or blocking of viewing of specific portions of the document. Redaction can protect confidential information from being known in document that are widely disseminated.

Digital Signatures. A digital signature is a marker placed on the document that confirms the validity of the document contents. In official documents it can show who has reviewed and approved a docuemnt with a date and time tha tthe approval was made.

PDF Portfolios. Portfolios are the collection of electronic data into a single container file. The data contained can be of all types. This is useful particularly as a file folder of a number of related documents. It is a useful way to organize files required for processes like loan applications and health insurance policies. A single digital signature can be applied to the entire portfolio.

Eugene Xiong, founder of Foxit, wrote for a piece in Forbes magazine, that “companies around the world are striving to become more digital and paperless, from converting existing paper documents into digital documents as part of large-scale efforts toward digitalization to the use of PDF to create digital forms and contracts that accelerate business interactions and processing. These companies are demonstrating the power of digital transformation to both protect the environment and improve business performance.”