Introduction to Information Rights Management

Information Rights management

There is only one technology that fully secures access to the data regardless of where it travels. The solution is to build the classification metadata, the access controls, and the information about which rights are allowed to individual users’ right in to the data itself. This solution is known as Information Rights Management (IRM). The software development companies use this as a solution to protect the data. 

IRM is essentially a combination of encryption and access controls that are built into document creation and viewing software applications, so that encrypted content can be decrypted and viewed based on access rights.We examine the history of rights management technologies that began with the digital entertainment industry and led to today’s IRM solutions that apply similar controls to any unstructured data.

IRM shrinks the security perimeter to the information itself. With IRM, you are not protecting the location where the information lives, nor the network it lives on. Instead, you are applying access control, encryption, and auditing to the information itself. That way, regardless of which disk the information resides on, which networks it travels across, or which database it may be resident in, IRM is able to provide a persistent level of security to the information wherever it goes.

IRM provides security protections not only for data at rest and data in transit, but also for data in use—which, is hard to accomplish. IRM technologies are able to prevent things like data being copied to a clipboard and pasted into another application. IRM can allow authorized users to open content while also limiting their ability to edit that content or make printed copies of it. With this level of control for data in use also comes auditing of all access to the information, even after it has left the perimeters of your network. These controls are basically impossible to implement with any other technology. 

With its fine-grained data-in-use features, the most valuable thing that IRM brings to the security landscape is the ability to control access to information, every time it is accessed, from any place it is copied to, and for every single copy, anywhere—along with the ability to revoke that access at any time. Imagine the scenario where your custom software development company has shared millions of e-mails, images, spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and so on with your business partners, customers, potential acquisitions, and employees (both current and long gone). Now imagine being able to revoke access to all that information and ensure that, as your business relationships and trusts change, you can maintain appropriate access to information even when it has long left the confines of your file servers, content management systems, and networks. The security of the data is persistent. Unlike nearly every other data security technology, the information is never given to the application or end user in an uncontrolled manner.

IRM technology extends the reach of information access control to well beyond places where you can typically deploy identity and access control technology. However, as with any technology, IRM has pros and cons.

Thus, every software development organization take into account IRM for data protection. IRM is not a replacement for existing security solutions, but it is an excellent tool to complement them. IRM represents a powerful tool for reducing risk of data loss.

Author Signature - Venu Majumdar