Document Scanning and GDPR Compliance

One of the changes to GDPR and the new Data Protection Act 2018 is being able to respond to Subject Access Requests (SAR’s) in a timely and cost effective way.

This requires you to know where your data is held and know exactly how many copies of the document exist. Individuals will also have the right to be forgotten which means data controllers must be able to locate all information relating to that individual and securely destroy it. In our previous blog we looked at the benefits of off-site document storage and GDPR.

Read on to find out how Scanning can help you become GDPR compliant.

New Requirements of GDPR

Right to Access – individuals have the right to request their personal information including an electronic copies of their data

Right to be forgotten – when data has passed its retention schedule date, firms are legally required to erase personal data belonging to an individual.

Security – digitised documents will significantly reduce the risk of documents being stolen or misplaced as scanned documents can be protected with passwords or the data can be encrypted. Taking these steps significantly reduces the risk of a data breach and ensures you are GDPR compliant.

Access – all documents are scanned and is OCR searchable (Optical Character Recognition). This makes the process of finding documents very quick with just a few tap of the keyboards, compared to sorting through physical files and documents. Being able to respond quickly to SAR’s is a new requirement of GDPR, which means OCR searchable files are vital to ensure GDPR compliance.

Cost – the one off cost of scanning documents is minimal to the costs associated with handling and managing paper documents. If you have an archive room or storage unit filled with client files, there is an opportunity cost associated with this space. Could you use this space for more product storage? Could you use this space to hire another employee? Are you paying for empty space in a storage unit? If the answer is yes to the above questions, it may be beneficial to go paperless and store your archive digitally.

Take a look at our document scanning calculator to see how much document scanning costs.

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