Scanners and Shared Drives

Along the same lines as my recent post on photocopiers and information security, a friend of mine tells me that, in his organization:

… we have a major issue with people leaving scanned expenses on a shared drive. It’s great technology, but easy to forget the obvious.

Again, we have messages for two audiences:

1. For All Staff – Be aware that scanners attached to PCs may well store copies of scanned documents on a local or networked hard drive, and those copies may be accessible to other people using the same computer. This is especially important to remember if you ever use a scanner outside your organization’s office e.g. at a Fedex/Kinkos, at a client site, at home, in a library …
2. For IT Staff – As far as possible, try to ensure that copies of scanned documents aren’t stored in public disk space. If that’s not possible and you handle sensitive documents, designate certain PCs+scanners as acceptable for sensitive documents and restrict access to those PCs.

As my friend says, the obvious is easy to forget.