Gateway to Data Risk: Users, Document Security and Rights Management

The most important digital assets of your company include your systems, applications, documents, and data. In the event of an information leak, system downtime or data theft, your business could suffer immense losses. The losses could be in the form of direct financial fraud, damage in brand and reputation, loss of customers and business, litigations, penalties and regulatory fines.

In some cases, despite implementing front line defence systems such as firewalls, identity and access management, data loss prevention tools, anti-virus and anti-malware software and more, they may not be sufficient to prevent a data breach. This is because if users have been given authorization to access and use information then none of the above tools control how that information can be used (for example a user may share information they have been given access to, print it, etc.).

The primary issue with maintaining data and document security is that your privileged users or authorized staff, including everyday business users, IT administrators, external contractors and other permitted parties are often the problem. And because they are the ones with direct access to your company’s valuable digital assets to perform productively, therein lies the greatest threat to your data and document security. Privileged and permitted users have direct access to your network and can easily bypass your security perimeter, or your security systems because they have requisite permissions to do so. Hence, your security solution can be rendered useless if these users steal your data by leaking information unintentionally or purposefully.

The outcome of such a scenario is that your privileged users and authorized user accounts are the most prominent risk factors that exist in your company. One of the most significant reasons behind data breaches security incidents taking place today is due to user-based risk. So, protecting data in storage and transit is now more critical than ever. As content is shared among employees, customers, partners and third-party contractors across web-based applications, it must be protected regardless of where it travels. Disseminating digital content to collaborate among businesses – such as financial data, merger and acquisition plans, intellectual property rights, the blueprint for the next big service or product – requires stringent and granular control that only digital rights management, information rights management,or enterprise rights management can offer.

Rights Management sytems not only protects internal and external workflow, but it meets stringent data protection regulations imposed by legislation. The variety of features it employs fits every data security mission. By providing the creator of a document with control such as content controlled access; and distribution and use throughout the lifecycle of the document can ensure that the content is secured thoroughly. Digital rights management protects document content for life or can limit the document to a one-time viewing. It can prevent content duplication; stop screen captures, stop printing, forwarding, redacting, deleting and any form of alteration to the original document. You can even revoke documents and stop privileged user’s accessing them even after they have been opened. With DRM, you can assign the roles and document policies as the content owner and be assured that your document is not accessed by unauthorized users, tampered with or misused.

Information theft – sometimes by insiders – is a growing concern that can be seen in the rising percentage of data security breaches. And as statistics and studies show that in most cases, data breaches take place because of permitted users. However, human error can cause a more significant deal of damage than out of malice. With a rights management solution, you have the opportunity of creating several new paradigms to retain and capture value; until recently, there was no means to do so. Organizations that have employed a rights management solution such as DRM have successfully secured sensitive information and intellectual property, while also meeting federal regulations.

Although some companies have several layers of data and document security in place, the ability to dynamically alter or modify content access or security levels is only present with rights management solutions. If you have sensitive and classified information, you may want it to be secured without ever getting it in the wrong hands. A data leak could have a considerable impact on your bottom line, with a challenging task to quantify its result in dollars.

Almost every day, the user risk landscape is growing and data loss is the fastest-growing data security threat faced by organizations across the world. To mitigate user-based risk is to understand where this risk is originating. And to prevent such dangers from becoming into data security incidents, it can help to rely on a rights management solution that can monitor and audit your users, while importantly being a proactive data and document security solution in eliminating threats in the first place. From real-time activity alerts, instant notification, the immediate shutdown of content access, in addition to user behaviour analytics and textual forensics, you can benefit from DRM, information and enterprise rights management, and secure your company documents and data effectively.