Persistently Protecting Your Computer Aided Designs
Enterprise Rights Management over the years has made great inroads into the protection of computer aided design files. 95% of CAD files represent intellectual property of businesses around the world, however the dark-side to CAD is that in electronic format can be emailed or transferred to another party without the knowledge of the owner of the content.
Today many designs are sent to countries like China, Indonesia and India for manufacturing with confidential disclosure contracts binding on the manufacturer, but what happens if a rogue employee gets hold of the designs and sells it on to other businesses? As an owner of intellectual property like computer aided designs you owe it to the survival of your business to make sure you can monitor where your IP is and be in control of it no matter where it may be located.
This article by Robert MacMillan is a very interesting read on unstructured data, enterprise rights management and data leakage prevention.
Robert a proponent that IT Administrators are expected to manage permissions to data without knowledge of the business context of the information makes a strong argument for endpoint security tools like enterprise rights management and data leakage prevention within the enterprise to control access to unstructured documents.
Do you work with external partners and suppliers? Do you have to share confidential or sensitive information with these partners and suppliers, but worried about that information going beyond the permitted parties? This video from Fasoo explains how you can secure information that travels beyond your firewall, with the ability for you to monitor and control that information.
This video tells you about the capability of enterprise rights management, which is also known as information rights management and how it can help secure your sensitive documents.
Protecting Corporate Sensitive and Confidential Information Across the Enterprise.
There are 2 types of information that need to be protected across the enterprise. The first is structured data which is the data you find in database repositories like Oracle, Sybase and Microsoft’s SQL Server. The other is unstructured data which can be protected by a number of other means like file encryption, full disk encryption, access authentication, information rights management and a number of other means.
Structured Data: Security in this area has moved on in leaps and bounds over the last 10 years, but according to the Enterprise Strategy Group 86% of enterprises feel that their databases are secure, yet 56% have experienced a breach indicating that many organisations still have a false sense of security. One of the worst data breach cases has been Heartland Payment Systems that experienced a breach in 2008 and is still paying out millions in compensation. However, the good news about protecting structured data is that given the right advice and the right tools, the effort required to plug all the non-compliance holes and eliminating the data leak risks that may exist.
Unstructured Data: This is the most challenging type of data to keep a lid on because it is very easy to duplicate and very difficult to track, moreover structured data is always analysed in an unstructured format used to provide strategic direction for the organisation. This means it is easier for your competitors to know what you are doing if there is a rogue or disgruntled employee on the inside. The challenges in protecting unstructured data is defining the data categories, locating where this data is and classifying it before protecting it. Information rights management commonly called enterprise rights management and data loss prevention are at the forefront of protecting unstructured data which would normally exist as boardroom strategies, intellectual property, financial information, trade secrets, etc.
So as you move to protect your information assets there has to be a balance between protecting both structured data and unstructured data to ensure that focusing on only one area of data security does not make the other area of data protection vulnerable and vice verza.
Welcome to the Enterprise Rights Management space (Also known as Information Rights Management). My name is Peter Abatan, an advisor in Enterprise Rights Management. I believe the potential for Rights Management is still greatly unknown, my prediction is that it will become the security tool that both businesses and individuals embrace.
Watch this space for ideas on how Enterprise Rights Management will become the key to driving new innovations on the web and within organisations.
In this space I would be evaluating software from all vendors namely:-
If you are an Enterprise Rights Management Software vendor and want to be listed please or need help with advice on Enterprise Rights Management click on the contact button on the right hand side of your screen.
