Enterprise-level security is obviously crucial to the functioning of any business, regardless of size; the cost of data breaches globally averages about $4M per company. (Some can be much greater, of course.)

There are two elements when thinking about security: one is the concept of being hacked or manipulated by an external source. That kind gets the most media attention, but there’s also internal security. That involves:

• Audit trails
• Version control
• Document retention

Essentially, your content is your content. You want to know who’s been making changes/updates to it, you want to know what the most recent version to be working from is, and you want to make sure everything you need is retained in a central location.

The intersection point that companies want to hit with their ECM internally is “secure” + “organized.”

Let’s address the audit trails issue for a second. Usually the word “audit” causes people to cringe, especially around April, like now. But some audits are actually good. We just reconfigured aspects of Contentverse (128-bit encryption helps with those external hacks, FYI) and our audit trail system is now legitimately air tight.

Not knowing who made a crucial change to a file, or finding that content has been deleted, is awful. So we now track every single move made within the system – and every single version of every file can be saved. This means you get full visibility into and full accountability for your entire organization – and it’s all taken care of behind the scenes.

A win-win: the security, organization, and accountability are in place without you even thinking about it.

Version control is another nightmare. We’ve all worked off docs for hours, only to realize that was three versions behind the doc everyone else is evaluating. That creates wasted time and people essentially running in circles. We solved that with tight version control as well; files update to the most recent, but there’s a log of all changes for all-time. So you can always be assured you’re working on the latest, but you have complete access to everything beforehand should you need it.

And finally, retention. Not being able to find a document is yet another less-than-positive dreamscape. Anything within our system can be found within seconds, even if someone — and you’ll know who! — managed to delete it.

Work is often simpler than we make it out to be, but when we add layers of different processes — and when different departments follow different protocols — it becomes more confusing. Your content is essential to your business, and people need to know where to find it, who’s been working on it, and how to get it back when it disappears. With all the busyness and complexity of most workplaces, why wouldn’t you simplify your ECM processes as much as possible?