Altering or falsifying electronic records is easy. This makes being able to prove the authenticity of your legitimate electronic records that much more important. Could you prove the authenticity of your electronic records in a legal or regulatory dispute? The AbsoluteProof Service from Surety was designed to give you the proof you need to defend the integrity and authenticity of your electronic records - now, or at any time in the future.
Organizations realize significant efficiencies and productivity gains when moving to electronic records. They are easier to create, search, share, access, and archive; they can enable more efficient business processes, greater collaboration, and advanced correlation or data; and they are friendlier to the environment. The down side of electronic records is that they are easily altered or falsified. As a result, they can be easily challenged if ever presented as evidence in a legal or regulatory proceeding.
Most electronic records and files today are born electronic. These include office documents, digital photographs, audio and video files, medical records, medical imagery, CAD designs, web sites, and instrumentation data, to name just a few. Much of this data will never appear in paper form. How can you have confidence in the integrity of this data? How can you know it hasn't been altered once it was created?
AbsoluteProof® enables you to defend the authenticity of your electronic records, files or other digital content. With AbsoluteProof you can independently and objectively prove that your records existed at a particular point in time and have not been altered since.
Why You Need AbsoluteProof | The Changing Legal Landscape
The courts are making judgments on the side of prudent and rigorous electronic record authentication. Any retained electronic business record can be used as evidence for or against you in the course of litigation, audits and regulatory investigations, as long as the records can be proven authentic.
Consider Judge Paul W. Grimm's ruling in the Lorraine vs. Markel case: "If it is critical to the success of your case to admit into evidence computer stored records, it would be prudent to plan to authenticate the record by the most rigorous standard that may be applied."
Currently there is no single standard for the use and retention of electronic records. But, given the increasing pressure to ensure that electronic records are managed in a prudent and compliant manner, you should take steps to proactively preserve the authenticity and evidentiary strength of your electronic records NOW!
Regulatory/Legal Compliance
Do you have a regulatory requirement to maintain authentic records? The Uniform Law Commission of the US recently passed the Uniform Electronic Materials Act, which requires state government electronic records to be authenticated. Additionally, the federal government recently was issued a Presidential mandate to improve its electronic record preservation process. How are you proving that you are meeting these kinds of requirements?
Professional Liability
Do you maintain records as an element of your profession that you will need in order to protect yourself against a liability claim? For example, are you collecting client or patient information and electronically storing your notes and other recordings? If a patient or client were to file a professional liability claim against you, could you prove those records are authentic and accurately reflect their original state? If you can't prove the authenticity of your records and files, you won't be in business very long.
Protecting Custodial Data
Do you take possession of and manage other parties data? Can you prove that it hasn't changed during your watch? Does that expose you to liability? Do your customers have a concern over the protection of their data being maintained in the cloud?
Protecting Data in the Cloud
Today, many IT applications that were traditionally managed inhouse have been outsourced to third-party service providers operating in a cloud environment. Archiving, transcription, e-commerce, and record management are but a few applications that have moved to the cloud. How do you know that data you have entrusted to the cloud has not been altered? How does the fact that your data is in the cloud affect your ability to defend its authenticity?
If you are a cloud service provider, how can you defend yourself against a claim that the data has been altered, whether innocently or maliciously, while you had custody of it? Using AbsoluteProof gives you the strongest proof of the validity and authenticity of records, thus allowing you to focus on delivering your services and mitigating your risk. Integrating AbsoluteProof into your service operations can deliver new revenue opportunities, and provide a key service differentiator - that of irrefutable proof of customers' data integrity - over your competition.
It doesn’t matter the business you are in or what your specific data integrity challenges are, you need absolute proof to withstand today's integrity and authenticity challenges. No matter your industry, or whether you're maintaining your own records and content, or are using the cloud, Surety can help lock down and enable proof of the integrity of critical business records and other digital content.
AbsoluteProof Electronic Record Authenticity Solutions:
- AbsoluteProof for OpenText Content Server - an automated software module for providing content integrity of records in the Content Server ECM framework
- AbsoluteProof for MS SharePoint - an automated software module for providing content integrity of records in the Microsoft SharePoint platform
- AbsoluteProof for MS Exchange -an automated software module for providing content integrity for email messages and attachments
- AbsoluteProof Desktop - easy-to-use application for one-click "sealing" and validating individual records, files or other digital content on Windows-based desktop systems
- AbsoluteProof Sign & Seal - desktop application that enables incorporating both the "signing" and the "sealing" of electronic content, delivering increased protection for long-term legal defensibility beyond what a digital or electronic signature alone can provide
- AbsoluteProof FolderSeal - Windows-based application that performs automatic "sealing" of new or updated records or files stored in folders and subfolders
- AbsoluteProof FLEX - a powerful, cross-platform, Java-based utility that enables quick integration of AbsoluteProof into wide variety of environments, including script-based web applications; and supports administrators in testing and managing "sealed" content produced by other applications
- Software Development Kits - for integration of AbsoluteProof into virtually any environment, including custom applications, commercial products, cloud services, content management systems, web and mobile applications, scanners, etc. SDKs are available for Java, .NET, C++, as well as a REST-based SDK that can be used for any language or environment.