What is Redaction? 7 Best Redaction Software to Hide Sensitive Data

A redaction software is a tool that can search and remove text, images, audio, and other content containing private, sensitive, or confidential information.

The tools help to reliably mask or remove sensitive information from a document, website, video footage, or another information source before sharing with other people not permitted to see all entire document.

Besides excluding the sensitive data, the redaction software and tools enable businesses to comply with various data protection regulations that prohibit sharing private information without a customer’s consent. Consequently, this improves the confidentiality and security of the data and customers while minimizing the commercial and regal risks for exposing personal information.

Usually, displaying credit cards numbers, bank accounts, and other sensitive information on documents, email messages, application dashboards, and other areas increases the risk of unauthorized access and theft of confidential data. Criminals can steal the data and exploit it to launch attacks, threaten the users, and sell the information, among many other crimes.

To reduce risks and comply with data privacy standards such as GDPR, PCI, and DSS, it is essential to remove all the sensitive information before sharing the content with the broader audience. For example, during litigation in the legal provision, the redaction process removes or blackouts the sensitive or privileged information from the documents before exchanging them.

Redaction software

Unlike the physical documents that use a black marker to mask the sensitive data, the redaction processes in the electronic documents are more effective since they permanently remove the sensitive information. However, this requires effective and reliable redaction software.

When looking for a redaction software or tool, the automated solutions are faster, easier to use, and more effective than those that rely on manual actions. Other desirable features include the ability to automatically track and provide a report of the redaction activities. Besides easing the auditing work, this enables the organizations to easily check and ensure that they comply with the necessary legal requirements.

While there are many solutions in the market, here are the best redaction tools solutions to help you protect sensitive and confidential data when sharing or exchanging digital content.

• 1. Adobe Acrobat Professional
• 2. Egress Respond
• 3. CaseGuard
• 4. Objective Redact
• 5. Oracle Data Redaction
• 6. Text IQ redaction software
• 7. e-Redact

1. Adobe Acrobat Professional

Adobe Acrobat Pro’s redaction is a powerful feature for removing sensitive information from pdf files. Besides creating pdf files, the Adobe software has the Remove Hidden Information feature that allows you to redact confidential text, images, and other sensitive information.

The Remove Hidden Information feature, a component of Adobe Acrobat Pro, allows you to remove text, images, and even hidden sensitive or private information.

Features

• Sanitize documents to remove all visible and hidden sensitive information before publishing a PDF file.
• Search and redact specific patterns, phrases, single or multiple words to redact.
• Redact the document author’s name, creation date, watermarks, attachments, and other hidden text and metadata.
• After redaction, add redaction codes, coloured boxes, colourful figures, or custom text over the removed items.

This software also allows you to remove form fields, actions, JavaScript, and other content or code that makes it possible to modify or change the document’s appearance.

2. Egress Respond

The Egress Respond is a reliable and powerful software that provides automated redaction for emails before delivering them to the recipients. The solution, which works mainly as a cloud mailer server, is available for applications such as MS Outlook and the Windows, iOS, and Android platforms. 

Features 

• A robust and reliable email redaction tool ideal for highly regulated industries that need to enforce stringent data protection and privacy regulations.
• An intelligent email security system provides end-to-end protection for sensitive information, ensuring secure sending and receiving emails containing confidential data.
• Automated protection of sensitive data with highly effective message-level encryption.
• Mobile apps are available to enable users of Windows, iOS, or Android phones to access the Egress platform.
• Enables you to comply with data privacy best practices as well as regulations

Unlike normal practice, the email client does not download the emails. Instead, the tools allow you to read and send emails directly from the Egress server.

3. CaseGuard

CaseGuard is a powerful and reliable redaction tool that removes sensitive information from complex pdf, images, audio, and video files.

Features

• Redacts any document regardless of industry. Typical applications include removing sensitive information such as names, credit cards numbers, email addresses, and other private data from medical, police, personnel, and bank records, tax forms, and more.
• It allows you to automatically detect and quickly redact sensitive information such as faces, license plates, people, screens, papers, vehicles, and more from a wide range of footage.
• Enables you to easily, quickly, and automatically redact, transcribe, and translate files that contain sensitive information
• It allows you to perform bulk redaction, allowing you to automatically and quickly remove sensitive information from thousands of pages and images and hours of video or audio recordings.

The comprehensive solution is suitable for several file types in almost any industry. Its easy-to-use and intuitive workflows make it suitable for everyone, including those with little redaction experience.

4. Objective Redact

Objective Redact is a powerful, fast, and cost-effective redaction tool that permanently blocks out selected sensitive, confidential information from electronic documents.

Features

• Removes all sensitive, private, or confidential information from almost any type of electronic document (emails, Excel, Word, images, graphics, PDF, and complex documents).
• Irreversibly removes all selected information and associated traces such as metadata, hidden code, author, creation date, and other attributes.
• An easy, customizable and intelligent tool that allows you to search for structured data or specific phrases, create custom rules, collaborate, and more.
• Scalable and automated with time-saving capabilities such as bulk redaction of high-volume documents, multiple pages, or group of documents.
• Review a document with relevant people before finalizing the redaction process.

During redaction, the tool creates a working copy, retaining the original document unchanged. Additionally, it creates the final redacted version as well as an optional audit copy.

5. Oracle Data Redaction

Oracle Data Redaction is an effective tool that provides advanced obstruction of sensitive data in real-time. Generally, Oracle’s Advanced Security Suite component allows you to mask the data matching specific application queries hence enabling you to comply with regulations such as SOA, PCI DSS, and more.

Features

• Mask the sensitive data that database applications display hence ensuring that unauthorized users cannot see the confidential information
• Provides on-the-fly selective masking of sensitive information on the database query results before the display by the applications.
• Flexibility to perform full, random, or partial redaction, such as masking an entire database column or just a portion.
• Allows you to search and redact data patterns based on regular expressions such as email addresses.
• Suitable for applications where data changes frequently.

Generally, the tool does not alter the original data, type, and format. It preserves the data in the storage, buffers, and caches.

6. Text IQ redaction software

Text IQ (Now acquired by Relativity) is a powerful, effective AI-based redaction tool that enables organizations to remove all sensitive information from digital documents, complying with PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, and other privacy regulations.

Features

• An efficient and fast AI-driven sensitive data discovery solution.
• Quickly identify and automatically remove private and confidential information from documents.
• Efficient, time and cost-saving while reducing the risk of exposing private and sensitive information to unauthorized people.
• Automated, fast evaluation, filtering, and redacting large quantities of unstructured data.
• Secure AI-powered engine that identifies and removes confidential and other sensitive data are hidden deep inside enterprise data.

The tool comes with a validation feature to verify that sensitive information has been redacted sufficiently according to requirements.

7. e-Redact

e-Redact is an advanced document redaction software that provides irreversible removal or blanking of sensitive and confidential information from electronic documents.

Features

• Automatically search and redact specific phrases, subject names, regular expressions such as email address, social security number, etc.
• Reliable, irreversible, and instant removal or blacking out sensitive information from various electronic documents and data sources.
• Helps organizations to comply with GDPR, Act, AIO, EIR, DPA, and other data privacy regulations
• Secure, fast, and high-efficiency redaction tool
• Automatically and quickly search and redact unique expressions, as well as specific words or phrases.

It works with various files, including regular digital documents, scanned output, database reports, and other information sources.

Conclusion

Today, redaction software is a critical tool for protecting the confidential information of an organization or individual. An effective tool ensures that unauthorized people or a wider audience cannot see the sensitive information for the business, customers, and users.