GDPR Compliancy

If your organization uses fax communications to share personally idendifiable information you could be at risk of violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and could be subject to a heavy fine when the regulation comes into full force on May 25, 2018. Every organization that handles EU resident data is required to follow GDPR, and should consider the following:

Does your organization use analog fax machines, or fax as a means of communication? Even if the machines are used simply for back-up or departmental use, this is a big risk as data sent and received is not logged!

How does your organization manage its archive? Retrieving data in a timely manner is one of the GDPR requirements. Traditionally, documents in digital archives are merely images and the data contained within them is not searchable.

Is your business data stored in silos? Will you be able to fully search your organizations complete archive for all personally identifiable information? The retrieval of personally identifiable information spans the entire organization not simply where the request was made.  Should you process, handle, or allow your data to be handled by third parties, you could be at risk for GDPR violation.

How can Faxination help?

1. Move away from analog fax machines that are a GDPR risk.

We often see, even in companies that already use Faxination, that analog fax machines are still being used as backup or at departmental level. Here specifically is where your GDPR compliance is at risk. An easy and quick fix to this problem is to use Faxination and connect it to your MFP for extra security. Read more about Faxination scanner/MFP support on the solutions page here.

2. Now is the time to move to a central and consolidated repository for all business documents.

Faxination can integrate directly with Microsoft SharePoint as a central document management system. This way, all faxes, in- and outbound, are centrally stored which makes data archiving and management more efficient.

3. Make all documents full text searchable.

With Optical Character Recognition (OCR), a feature of Faxination, both in- and outbound faxes become searchable text that can be automatically indexed by SharePoint. OCR converts the text allowing for easy search, copy, and indexing. In addition, faxes are converted into PDF/A, the ISO standard for long term archiving.

4. Begin to  log in- and outbound fax messages.

Precise time stamping of the delivery receipt, centralized logging and reporting tools, allow organizations to monitor when, who, and what has been sent or received as a fax message. These valuable insights help give valuable insights into all in- and outbound fax traffic for all offices, applications, and devices.