I was reading a short article on the Computer Weekly website about the recent data breach at ACS:Law. The article echoes what I have been saying for quite some time about the security of unstructured documents. Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at Imperva commented that the recent data breach highlights a hidden security weakness in unstructured data.

Many organisations have spent millions on securing their databases (structured), leaving a big security hole in not addressing the security of unstructured data. What many organisations forget or miss is that all the data in the database is not very helpful to executives and managers if it cannot be interpreted in a way that makes sense.

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As you know Enterprise Rights Management also referred to as Information Rights Management is all about protecting unstructured data. Derek Brink of Aberdeen Group gave an interesting webinar on BrightTalk in May of 2009 on how organisations manage and address security for unstructured data and how best-in-class manage to serve and protect their unstructured data.

To access this webinar you need to create an account with BrightTalk if do not have one. This webinar is located under Governance, Risk and Compliance under Information Technology. The research paper on which this webinar is based can be accessed via the Aberdeen Group website.

You can access the webinar here.

Length of webinar: 33 minutes

In today’s world cyber-criminals are becoming more and more sophisticated. They know that businesses keep all kinds of confidential and sensitive data on their computer systems. From Intellectual property to product designs, strategy documents, specification documents, customer records and bank details, all these have the potential to be monetized once accessed. A recent case is Daniel Houghton a rogue MI6 agent who wanted to sell confidential documents to the Dutch intelligence services for £2M GBP ($3M USD)

Through Trojans and other forms of malware, a cyber-criminal can access business data indefinitely and undetected. This provides the criminal with an illegal revenue stream for long period. 72 percent of British companies with 50-500 staff suffered an average of 15 incidents a year. Apart from this employees make honest mistakes in the way they handle confidential data, and example is sending an email to the wrong recipient, see the Eli Lilly example.

IT security today has to extend beyond perimeter security i.e. erecting a firewall. The question is not if your firewall is breached, but when it is breached what measures have been taken to prevent criminals getting at your core company data. Endpoint security is core to any organisation that wants to make sure its confidential data stays within the business.

Enterprise rights management (ERM) software is an endpoint tool that manages and enforces information access policies and use rights of electronic documents within an enterprise; its development has been predicated on digital rights management (DRM) technology. Digital rights management (DRM) was developed to provide a systematic approach to copyright protection for digital content, generally by means of a suite of software employing the following technologies: identity/role management, privilege management, tamper-detection, cryptography and persistent security. Using Enterprise rights management, creators of digital content may assign rights to future users to take subsequent actions on that ERM-protected content (e.g., opening, printing, editing, copying, or forwarding the content).

2010 has seen an increase in uptake of enterprise digital rights management and analysts from Gartner, Forrester and Aberdeen are optimistic about the growth trends over the next 5 years. Many organisations are beginning to realise they can no longer effectively control and manage their security perimeter and are moving their data security to endpoints. This is a responsible move, and will gain popularity over the next decade now that the cost barriers are falling with a simple and effective installation costing as low as $6,000.