Nowadays we generate a large amount of digital documents, whether personal or commercial, and the management of these files is a regular part of our daily activities.
It is common we need to send documents online to our relatives or friends, and share private information with them. Inside companies it is fundamental to send documents by internet to customers, suppliers or co-workers.
We must become aware that this apparently trivial process of sending documents on internet involves certain risks that we should try to control. It is convenient to follow cybersecurity guidelines that protect our personal information or business data from falling into unauthorized hands.
How to send documents securely?
There are multiple ways to send documents through the Internet, however, you must analyze it from the security spectrum when you finally decide which one to use. There are several possibilities, let's analyze the most used tools and ways to work with them:
Send documents via email
It is the most popular option to send files online, but also the most unprotected one as it leaves hackers easy access to your information. In addition, attachments can be a bait to infect the recipient computer with some malware. Keep in mind that this type of email services limit the documents size you can send, so will not be a valid alternative if you want to send large and heavy documents.
Send documents on whatsapp
The popular application has incorporated an option to send documents in almost any format: pdf, doc, xls, and ppt. Due to the ease of use of the platform, we often use Whatsapp to send important information. This involves several risks: information can be disseminated among unauthorized persons, which could it bring as a consequence a lack of data protection regulations.
Send documents via dropbox
This cloud service facilitates sharing access to documents and streamlines many business processes. However, we must bear in mind that using any cloud service implies a certain vulnerability of the material we store and share, since any security breach that compromises an access account to that service could expose our material. So you have to be very careful, establish strong passwords and, if possible, configure double factor authentication.
Send documents on facebook messenger
Another well known and used messaging tool but, unlike whatsapp, Facebook Messenger service only allows you to send documents from your computer, while in the mobile version you can just send photos. Its usage is limited considering it does not admits send large documents, unless you work with other services that allow you to share a download link through the chat, which would make a longer and complicated process. On the other hand, regarding security and privacy, Facebook is not a secure tool to send confidential or private documents, so it is not recommended especially in business field.
Send large documents
As we have already explained in the previous section, there are several online tools that allow us to send documents over internet, also we have commented on the security level of several of these solutions: mail, Whatsapp, cloud services, among many others.
The task of protecting our documents becomes more complex when files to be sent are large and heavy. In that cases, sending documents by email is not a valid option, since we already know it is limited by size attachment capacity and the same can be apply for most of the solutions mentioned above.
Cloud services like Dropbox allow us to solve the size problem and send large and heavy documents, but we saw previously that it does not guarantee files security, so we must be cautious in its usage.
The safest option to send large and heavy documents is to use a file encryption service, which ensures that if a file falls into wrong hands, hackers will not be able to access information.
There are several solutions in the market that allow us encrypting files, but many of them are technically complex and difficult to integrate in work environments. For this reason, many people and companies dismiss its usage.
That is why we present you HushApp as a safe alternative. This application allows you to send large and heavy documents with total security, since your documents remain encrypted locally, remotely and in transit. The best thing is that this high level of security does not reduce the usability of the solution.
With its simplicity and comfort, HushApp offers you: zero knowledge technology, integration between web and mobile version, contact management, sending documents in one click to your network and send it securely to third parties that do not use HushApp.
Summarizing: we work to demonstrate that usability is not incompatible with security.