Electronic versus
Physical Records
Security of Electronic Records versus Physical Records
Governments and people constantly hack computer systems. Governments hack to learn what other governments are doing. Corporations hack to get information about their competitors. Professional hackers hack to get financial and personal information about people. Security firms hire investigators to hack relative to personal legal cases or personal investigations. Disgruntled employees download and steal information stored on computers.
A typical database may have a few fields up to 100’s of fields of information. But, the number of fields and words that are contained physical records may be in the 100,000’s thousands to millions. As such, there is significantly more data on documents within file folders than there is data in databases.
As such, if an organization digitizes records, those records and all of their data, are now subject to hackers, disgruntled employees and contractors. Rather than a hacker being able to access or an employee to be able to download all files and documents, if files remain in physical format without digitization, then that data and documents are vastly more secure than electronic documents/files.
To compromise physical files, someone has to breach a facility and/or a file room and be able to find what they are looking for, and physically steal or copy documents. It is significantly more difficult to access and compromise physical versus electronic files.