Forrester has just released a market overview on Enterprise Rights Management by Brian Hill and Andrew Jaquith. This is a well written research document with the latest perspective on the Enterprise Rights Management market. Products from 8 key vendors are evaluated namely Adobe Systems, Covertix, EMC, GigaTrust, Liquid Machines, Microsoft, NextLabs and Oracle. Forrester believes that Enterprise Rights Management is among the most robust information protection technologies available to organisations today, yet it is regarded as optional.

This paper asserts that Enterprise rights management enquiries are not as high data loss prevention and is described as a “tweener technology” with very few enterprisewide deployments. The largest deployment I know is 50,000 seats at Samsung in Asia through the software vendor Fasoo, after which many other deployments I know of are 1,000 seats or less. Forrester also expressed that high costs are still a concern and a barrier to adopting this technology, but I can see this barrier being lowered with cost effective solutions now becoming available.

Forrester is optimistic about the future growth of enterprise rights management and describes strategies for deployment. The future for Enterprise rights management lies in further integration with other security tools like DLP and resource management tools like document management systems.

Although this market overview does not cover all the major enterprise rights management vendors; Brainloop, Fasoo and Seclore Technology are among the vendors missing from the list. I highly recommend that any organisation or department considering how to protect their information assets refer to this paper before a final decision is reached.

To obtain this document please go to the forrester website via the following link.