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Business…. today is not sustained by a single organization. It is built on a complex eco-system interwoven with vendors on one side and customers on the other. Organizations need to share information not only with internal employees but also externally with contractors, vendors and other business partners. There is a continuous inflow and outflow of content being created, gathered, transferred, received, modified, stored, disposed, etc. To ease out and streamline the intricate collaboration that is required within the organization and between their partners, sophisticated collaboration tools like Document Management Systems (DMS)/Electronic Content Management (ECM) are being extensively deployed.

The basic idea of a DMS is to enable employees to have ready access to the organization's documented base of facts, sources of information, and solutions. The base assumption is that sharing this information organization wide can lead to more effective ways of working and it could also lead to ideas for new and improved work methodologies. Over time data that is confidential, sensitive and IP also find their way into DMS.

But, this initiative to streamline information access brings new challenges. The frontrunner of these challenges is the security of the information when it is outside the DMS! It is widely known that collaboration and security are competing forces. DMS by virtue of its core functionality to enhance collaboration between users falls short of providing tight security to content when it is outside its realms. With content being added to the DMS repository every day, and with business relationships being volatile, the security issue becomes an exponentially building time bomb waiting to explode with dire consequences in terms of potential information leakage and its resultant revenue loss.

Enter Information Rights Management (IRM). Integrating IRM with DMS extends the security of repositories to protect content wherever it goes, within the confines of the DMS and beyond. Infact, IRM is the only technology that can help secure information as soon as it is created to its destruction point. IRM controls who (people, groups, teams, …), what (read, edit, print, distribute, …), when (dates, duration,…) and where (locations, IP addresses,…) of content when it is outside the DMS, thereby providing persistent security irrespective of the location. Predefined rules can be set such that as soon as a document gets created and uploaded into the DMS, the document gets immediately and automatically protected with the predefined rights, thus making IRM protection oblivious to the user and friendly to use.

The integration of IRM with DMS makes information-centric security for all confidential, sensitive and IP related content an achievable aim. The minimal cost and effort of having such a necessary and must have feature outweighs the risks of loosing sensitive information to a competitor.