Security, compliance and data governance requirements are becoming more stringent and challenging for enterprises in today’s world of consumerization of information technology and enterprise mobility where end-users are demanding anywhere, anytime access to corporate data for increased productivity. And, the external threat landscape has grown to a level never seen before.
Have you ever thought about the data leakage factors that can shake your business and destroy you compliance and governance plans?
Here are 3 key reasons why you need to seriously consider enterprise digital rights management (eDRM or information rights management) as part of enterprise file security, data governance and compliance strategy.
- Intellectual Property Protection
Intellectual property (IP) is critical asset for your business - possibly among the most important it possesses. These crown jewels can make your business successful by differentiating it from competitors, provide an important revenue stream and offer customers something significantly different from what they would otherwise it. Leakage of your company’s trade secrets (may it be R&D, sales or marketing documents) can result in sever losses – direct (financially) or indirect (in terms of competitive advantage) - which may even close down the business.
Enterprise rights management can help you protect sensitive intellectual property not only from unauthorized access but also to control the access to these documents based on various multi-dimensional parameters including recipient, device, geography, IP address, time. It can also restrict individual user’s ability to forward, copy or print the documents. And throughout the life cycle of documents, it can maintain the audit trails even after the documents go beyond your network and beyond your managed devices.
Most new-generation enterprise rights management solutions seamlessly integrate with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions to ensure that the information that requires highest security is locked down automatically through appropriate access rights been applied, while information that does not need securing is not touched. This may help you automatically protect the documents without leaving the document security to your end-users.
Many new-generation digital rights management solutions provide advanced controls such that your crown jewels stay restricted to certain content repositories or certain folders of a device, and they becomes inaccessible when they are stolen from these restricted locations.
- Regulations on Managing Third-party Data
Various industry verticals, including Banks/Financial Services/Insurance (BFSI) and Healthcare, fall under stringent data protection regulations (e.g. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)) that require them to control and protect third-party data under possession from security breaches all the time.
Enterprise digital rights management solutions are designed to control the operational use of documents by employees and partners so as to prevent theft or unauthorized sharing of financial information, medical records that may fall under such regulations.
Enterprise DRM can prevent content duplication via screen captures, digital watermarking, or printing. It can allow document owner to restrict the access only through a online document viewer (preventing document downloads with (optional) digital watermarks). It also allows restricted access during a particular time period and also allows recalling the access to shared files – making them inaccessible even after they are downloaded on a device beyond the control of enterprise IT or end-user of the organization.
- eDiscovery and Audit Trails
Compliance is not only preservation of records to ensure regulatory audit and evidentiary scrutiny, but it is a matter of reputation and integrity. The stakes are high and they are tied to the prosperity of business. The step towards ensuring compliance involves an efficient way to preserve, protect, manage and ensure authenticity of records.
Many enterprise digital rights management solutions provide data and meta-data retention, audit trails or logs for electronic discovery purposes. This helps enterprise IT with legal eDiscovery including complying with data storage and retention laws/regulations or being able to reproduce data as evidence (e.g. in case of a litigation or court cases).
Cybercrime is rampant. Many enterprises’ data is now available on WikiLeaks. Email chains from Sony Pictures and leaked memos from Barclays are among the scores of leaked documents now public record on WikiLeaks. A well-implemented enterprise DRM solution will make a big difference in the way companies do business, meet compliance and governance objectives, ensure privacy, and protect the digital assets of the company. DRM implementation means a big investment for companies, not only financially, but also in terms of time, resources, disruption and the risk of failure.
Look for a enterprise DRM that is part of a holistic enterprise file security platform that provides enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) as Enterprise-Dropbox (Dropbox Alternative), FTP Replacement with the ability to automatically replace large sized attachments of Outlook and Lotus Notes. With this, you will be able to give your employees what they need to be productive all the time, and you can ensure compliance, governance and data security such that that all company information is end-to-end protected, auditable and trackable.
