The U.S.A. based Identity Theft Resource Center estimates that year to date August 2018 there were over 750 data breaches affecting over 28 million records. In the United States alone there were over 15 million credit card numbers exposed in 2018 and over 100 million Social Security numbers exposed.

First and most importantly, every company owes their customers the assurance that the customer’s personally identifiable information (PII) that they are entrusted with will be protected from unauthorized access. Secondly, the financial implications of not protecting a customer’s PII can be staggering. Data regulators in the EU are able to fine upwards of €20 million. A number of high-profile companies have already suffered large-scale breaches since the new GDPR regulations came into force, meaning 2019 could well see the cost of failure skyrocket.

In an effort to help businesses safeguard an individual’s PII, Paragon Systems has developed DocuShield document redaction software. DocuShield is a comprehensive, efficient and affordable redaction software application for removing PII or any information from documents.

DocuShield can be configured to automatically locate information to be redacted on a document and then automatically redact the information. It all sounds easy enough, but behind the scenes there is a lot to be considered. First, a company receives documents in various formats. Some of these documents can be identified and processed without any conversion at all, they are textual. But, other documents are bitmap or encrypted and in order to redact these documents they must first be converted into a textual format. This requires an accurate OCR engine. Paragon’s DocuShield OCR process is fast and accurate when transforming non-textual documents into a document format that can be read and redacted.

The DocuShield Redaction application seamlessly integrates with M-Files and runs in an automated unattended mode. Every document that is processed is evaluated and assessed for redaction. The application also supports manual redaction for document exceptions where configured redaction confidence levels are not attained. These document exceptions can be easily corrected using the manual redaction editor. The editor utilizes Paragon’s HTML5 browser-based viewing technology, ParaVista.