Information Rights Management (IRM) is a form of IT security technology optimized to safeguard the documents containing sensitive information from unauthorized admittance. Distinct traditional Digital Rights Management (DRM) that smears to mass-produced media alike songs and movies, IRM applies to documents, spreadsheets, and presentations generated by individuals. IRM safeguards the files from unauthorized copying, viewing, printing, forwarding, deleting, and editing.
However, in order to understand Information Rights Management solution, its uses and benefits, it’s imperative to understand Digital Rights Management and how it relates to IRM.
The difference between DRM and IRM
DRM denotes to a cohort of admittance control technologies utilized to limit the access, editing, or modification of copyrighted digital properties beyond the settled terms of service. The primary objective of DRM is to protect intellectual property from being copied and dispersed without properly compensating the owners of the property.
Most normally, DRM is applied to mass-produced media comprising video games, software, audio CDs, HD DVDs, Blue-ray discs and ebooks. DRM can come in the kind of encryption, scrambling, digital watermarks, CD keys, etc.
Not astonishingly, DRM remains a controversial technology, with some even calling it anti-competitive. Others disapprove DRM for limiting the normal usage of something bought by the user.
As mentioned beforehand, Information Rights Management is the application of DRM to documents generated by individuals such as Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, emails, etc. Dissimilar DRM, which is commonly intended to protect copyrighted material, IRM is more often intended to protect the security of extremely sensitive information that may be contained in a document.
Moreover, information rights management solutions ( IRM ) is a discipline that contains managing, controling and fortifying content from unwanted access. IRM is a subset of digital rights management (DRM), which defends multimedia content, comprising video and music. While DRM aims on safeguarding the intellectual property from patent infringement and piracy, IRM aims on protecting sensitive data, particularly data that is switched with parties outside an organization (suppliers and partners, for example).
IRM is an imperative the consideration when overseeing enterprise document files, including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. IRM technologies utilize the encryption to protect files from unauthorized actions such as viewing, copying, printing, forwarding, removing or editing.
Not only has this, the Information rights management (IRM) frequently encrypts files to enforce admittance policies. After encryption, further information rights management rules can be functional to a file to deny/ permit certain activities. In some cases, this means that files can only be observed and the user cannot copy/paste the content in the document. In other cases, the information rights management rule can circumvent a user from taking screenshots, removal, or printing the document.
Organizations can create and apply custom information rights management (IRM) rules at the company, department, group, or user level based on data ascendency, compliance, and security desires. One of the most frequently cited advantages of IRM is that it maintains this guard even if files are shared with a third party. A user can be outside the corporate network, but IRM rules still safeguard the document. This means that IRM-stamped documents remain protected in any case where it is retrieved.