A few weeks ago I referred in one of my blog posts that Gartner has had its radar on Enterprise Rights Management. I also mentioned in my post that I will review the 2 most recent papers on Enterprise Rights Management, and that is what I intend to do here by reviewing the first paper published in May this year.

Enterprise Digital Rights Management by Eric Quellet is a must read paper for any organisation that is considering Enterprise Rights Management. It helps decision makers consider the implications of using Enterprise Rights Management to protect its intellectual property and how best to implement it. Eric starts of with the latest key findings about this security tool in which he refers to the proprietary nature of current EDRM solutions to which there are no industry wide standards. This has benefits from my perspective because it drives innovation for EDRM to become more user friendly and help reduce the total cost of ownership. There is something inherent about standards that slows the pace of innovation and development.

Eric also alludes to the fact that EDRM solutions are still premium priced, but this depends on the extent to which an organisation wants EDRM implemented. For example there are EDRM solutions that can be implemented for around £5,000 and can provide the necessary protection required.

There are some great recommendations for implementing EDRM and Eric clearly lays them out in clear understandable language. This report predicts a 3% uptake rate by all organisations globally by the year 2015, but I want to be more optimistic that it will far exceed this number considering that organisations becoming more aware how vulnerable they are becoming to corporate espionage many which are taking steps to stem the free flow of their intellectual property.

Eric puts forward a strong case for EDRM and defines what EDRM is, what it can do and how it works, I’ll call it EDRM 101.  Persistence security, i.e. the ability to control access to files protected by EDRM no matter where it is located is addressed as the biggest attraction to this security tool.

This paper also describes the various control configurations available for EDRM namely:-

• Embedded EDRM control configuration
• External EDRM control configuration
• Hybrid Internal-External EDRM control configuration

Eric recognises that data classification being at the heart of any EDRM deployment and infers that it should not be taken lightly if success is to be achieved. Other topics discussed are combining EDRM and content-aware DLP, additional EDRM capabilities and a final look into tools and solutions for EDRM.

I would definitely recommend this paper without hesitation as it provides a basis for which an organisation can ask the right questions of the enterprise rights management vendor, as well as understand their current data classification meets the necessary requirements to successfully implement EDRM.

Reference:
Enterprise Digital Rights Management by Eric Quellet. Published by Gartner Research, 19 May 2010.