Blog > Redaction of confidential data with MetaServer

Data privacy and compliancy is now more important than ever. A large amount of organizations dealing with confidential documents and data are still manually redacting this sensitive information.

It's a slow and error-prone process. MetaServer's new Redact module changes that.

For any organization handling documents containing personal data, for example: social security numbers, financial details, medical records,... redaction is often a legal requirement under frameworks like GDPR. The challenge is to apply this consistently and at scale.

With MetaServer's Redact module, you can:

• Eliminate manual redaction: no more blacking out fields per document by hand. After extracting the sensitive information, MetaServer remembers the location of that data and automatically blacks it out for you.
• Enforce compliance: the configuration of the redact action only needs to be defined once and is applied consistently to every document.
• Reduce errors: automated redaction removes the risk of sensitive data being missed. Optionally, if human intervention is required, you are also able to let an operator select sensitive data on the document during a validation step.

After

A well-designed document automation platform breaks workflows into distinct, configurable actions:

Import: the system watches a folder or email inbox. The moment a new document arrives, the workflow starts. This works for scanned PDFs via MFPs, email attachments or any document that lands in a monitored location.

Process: this is where the intelligence happens. The system separates multi-page scans into individual documents, classifies each one by type (for example, invoice, delivery note, purchase order, contract), extracts the relevant data fields, validates them against rules or database lookups and flags only the exceptions for human review.

Export: once processed, the document data are sent to wherever they need to go: a folder with a meaningful name, SharePoint, a DMS, like DocuWare or Alfresco, SAP, a database or any system accessible via REST API.

This whole sequence runs automatically. A person only gets involved when the system genuinely needs a judgement call, an unreadable field, an ambiguous document type or when a validation step specifically requires a human eye to enter or double-check important data.

If your organisation processes any of the following, the redact module is worth evaluating:

• Healthcare providers handling patient records or medical data
• Financial institutions processing loan applications, statements,...
• Legal and HR teams managing contracts, employment records,...
• Government organisations subject to privacy legislation
• ...

What makes this genuinely useful for enterprise environments is how it integrates.
Not as a standalone redaction tool requiring a separate workflow, but as a module within MetaServer's existing system.
You build redaction into your document processing the same way you build in classification, extraction or export.

For companies under increasing pressure to demonstrate privacy compliance, the redact module can be of very good use. Want to learn more? Have a look here.