Why We Built Duckuments
Our founder has spent more than 10 years working in the defence industry, specifically within the digital sector, building and working with systems operating across governed networks where security, data protection and controlled access are not optional extras. They are part of everyday life.
One problem kept coming up. Moving even a relatively simple document between different networks, organisations or clients could quickly become complicated. As you would expect, there are good reasons for this. GDPR, data protection and information security matter, and organisations need to know that sensitive information is being handled properly.
The problem was not the need for security. The problem was making that security practical.
There Had To Be A Simpler Way
There are already plenty of document-sharing products available. But we found that off-the-shelf solutions did not always provide the level of control required in more security-conscious environments as standard.
At the other end of the scale were bespoke, often on-premise solutions. These could provide much greater control, but they could also come with significant upfront costs, ongoing maintenance, infrastructure requirements and support overheads.
For something as fundamental as securely getting a document from one person to another, neither option felt particularly satisfying.
Not Every Document Is The Same
A company brochure does not need to be treated in the same way as a CV containing someone's personal details. An invoice may contain financial or business information. A utility bill could contain a person's name, home address and account details.
Yet in many cases, it is still down to the person sharing the document to decide whether it is sensitive and, more importantly, how sensitive it is.
Should the document require additional authentication? Should access expire? Should downloading be restricted? How long should the document remain available? Does it contain personal information that the sender has not even noticed?
We realised we were effectively asking people to make information-security decisions every time they shared a document.
What If The Document Could Help Make That Decision?
That question eventually became the idea behind Duckuments. Instead of asking the person uploading a document to understand every potential security risk themselves, we started experimenting with using AI to analyse the document first.
The early prototype was deliberately simple. We tested it using everyday documents such as CVs, household bills and other files containing different amounts and types of personal or sensitive information.
The system would analyse the contents, look for information that could require additional protection and use those findings to produce a risk score for the document.
That risk score could then influence how the document should be protected. A relatively low-risk document might require only standard secure sharing. A document containing more sensitive information could automatically trigger stronger safeguards around how it is uploaded, stored and accessed.
The document could tell us something about the level of protection it needed.
Taking The Guesswork Out Of Secure Document Sharing
The idea behind Duckuments is not to make document sharing more complicated. It is actually the opposite.
We want to take some of the complexity that normally sits with the person sending the document and move it into the platform. Upload a document. Let Duckuments analyse it. Understand its risk. Apply appropriate safeguards. Share it securely.
Behind those few steps can be encryption, secure storage, controlled access, expiry rules, authentication and AI-powered risk assessment. But the person using Duckuments should not need to be a cybersecurity expert to understand all of that.
They should simply be able to trust that the document is being handled appropriately.
Why The Duck?
Security software has a tendency to take itself very seriously. We wanted to build something that deals with a serious subject without feeling intimidating or overly corporate. Something simple, approachable and perhaps a little more memorable than another product with "secure", "vault" or "cloud" in its name.
Documents became Duckuments. The name stuck.
What began as an experiment to solve a problem we had encountered in highly governed environments is gradually becoming something we believe could be useful to businesses of all sizes.
Where We Are Going
Duckuments is still being built with the same principle that started the project: secure document sharing should not require the person sending the document to be a security expert.
AI gives us an opportunity to make security more adaptive, to look at what is actually being shared and help determine the protection it deserves.
We are continuing to develop that idea, improve how documents are assessed and make Duckuments as simple as possible to use. Because ultimately, sending a document securely should feel almost as easy as sending an attachment.
We just think there should be a lot more happening behind the scenes.