Global digital communications specialist Striata today released its Secure Document Repository (SDR). The SDR provides a convenient and accessible location for organisations to store documents where they can be accessed online by either customers or the representatives servicing those customers.

The SDR seamlessly plugs into the existing interfaces that customers use to interact with a company – mobile, web portal, email or the customer service centre.

For example, if a customer receives an email invoice, and wants to compare it to the previous month’s invoice or view a statement, they can go into the SDR and retrieve the documents they need, when they need them.

Alternately they can log on to the company’s secure web portal and access the information there, they can do the same via mobile app, or they can phone the call centre and an agent can then view the document and respond to any queries the customer may have.

Security was built into the repository from the ground up. Documents are encoded by Striata’s platform when stored to ensure they can only be securely accessed, and retrieval of a document from a repository requires a Striata login. Documents can be encrypted both at a database and an individual level.

The SDR is cloud-ready and can be deployed on site or as a software-as-a-service option. It supports any types of electronic document format (PDF, HTML, images etc) and uses smart compression technology to compress documents to a fraction of their actual size – this minimises storage and backup space requirements.

SDR requires no set up or customisation, unlike many document management platforms, and offers easy integration via a common API.

Business benefits include:

• business continuity - documents are digital and stateless and data can be easily replicated
• cost-savings & customer service – customers can serve themselves rather than using slower, more expensive channels
• scalability – the solution is enterprise-grade and is designed to be based on a clustered database environment, plus the compression technology used results in storage space savings
• compliance – built-in encryption meets requirements for customer data to be securely stored
• ease of access – search ability is built-in to the solution

The SDR, says Striata CEO Michael Wright, is a complementary solution to Secure Document Delivery (SDD) and enables customer to pull documents as required, where the SDD pushes documents, like invoices and statements, to customers securely and electronically.

“The ability to access secure, digital documents is assisting organisations to move to paperless environments, with the cost and security benefits that such a move enables. The combination of SDD and SDR enables Striata to deliver a comprehensive digital customer communications solution to its clients,” comments Wright.

Striata has recently been recognised by Gartner as a Niche Player in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Communications Management Software (2015). In its report, Gartner estimates that “CCM was an $800 million market for fiscal year 2014, and it is expected to show a compound annual growth rate of 9.8% from 2015 to 2020. Cost optimization remains one of strongest drivers for CCM — more than 70% of the customers Gartner surveyed reported that their top goal for implementing CCM was reducing the costs associated with printing and postage. This means a shift away from print to electronic communications”