The COVID-era risks of electronic data management
Traditional business processes have been significantly affected and altered by the pandemic, leading to some rapid requirements to move to new methods of working and new processes to handle information. The move to electronic processing can help mitigate the disruption caused by COVID-19 but can cause issues for maintaining compliance. Where traditional procedures had clear controls on how data is handled and keeping documents in a physical format made it easier to restrict access, electronic handling increases the risk of data being mishandled or the possibility of a data privacy breach, particularly if data is now being passed through a process by email or is being held on remote workers’ home computers.
Automating processes using a workflow solution that has full capabilities for audit, notifications, and access controls means you have control over how data is being distributed as well as being able to enforce structure to the process. When you also consider the benefits of reducing email traffic and being able to better spread the workload across a team or department, the efficiencies become even more obvious.