With the amount of digital assets a modern company has to deal with growing exponentially, the need to access them any time from any place, across various devices and platforms has become a critical factor for business success. This does not include just the employees – to stay competitive, modern businesses must be increasingly connected to their business partners, suppliers, current and future customers and even smart devices (or things). New digital businesses therefore have to be agile and connected.

Unsurprisingly, the demand for solutions that provide strongly protected storage, fine-grained access control and secure sharing of sensitive digital information is extremely high nowadays, with vendors rushing to bring their various solutions to the market. Of course, no single information sharing solution can possibly address all different and often conflicting requirements of different organizations and industries, and the sheer number and diversity of such solutions is a strong indicator for this. Vendors may decide to support just certain types of storage or document formats, concentrate on solving a specific pain points of many companies like enabling mobile access, or design their solutions for specific verticals only.

Traditional approach to securing sensitive information is storing it in a secured repository on-premise or in the cloud. By combining strong encryption and customer managed encryption keys or in the most extreme cases even implementing Zero Knowledge Encryption principle, vendors are able to address even the strictest security and compliance requirements. However, as soon as a document leaves the repository, traditional solutions are no longer able to ensure its integrity or to prevent unauthorized access to it.

Information Rights Management (IRM) offers a completely different, holistic approach towards secure information sharing. Evolving from earlier Digital Rights Management technologies, the underlying principle behind IRM is data-centric security. Essentially, each document is wrapped in a tiny secured container and has its own access policy embedded directly in it. Each time an application needs to open, modify or otherwise access the document, it needs to validate user permissions with a central authority. If those permissions are changed or revoked, this will be immediately applied to the document regardless of its current location. The central IRM authority also maintains a complete audit trail of document accesses.

Thus, IRM is the only approach that can protect sensitive data at rest, in motion, and in use. In the post-firewall era, this approach is fundamentally more future-proof, flexible and secure than any combination of separate technologies addressing different stages of the information lifecycle. However, it has one fatal flaw: IRM only works without impeding productivity if your applications support it. Although IRM solutions have gone a long way from complicated on-premise solutions towards cloud-based completely managed services, their adoption rate is still quite low. Probably the biggest reason for that is lack of interoperability between different IRM implementations, but arguably more harmful is the lack of general awareness that such solutions even exist! However, recently the situation has changed, with several notable vendors increasing efforts in marketing their IRM-based solutions.

One of the pioneers and certainly the largest such vendor is Microsoft. With the launch of their cloud-based Azure Rights Management services in 2014, Microsoft finally made their IRM solution affordable not just for large enterprises. Naturally, Microsoft’s IRM is natively supported by all Microsoft Office document formats and applications. PDF documents, images or text files are natively supported as well, and generic file encapsulation into a special container format is available for all other document types. Ease of deployment, flexibility and support across various device platforms, on-premise and cloud services make Azure RMS the most comprehensive IRM solution in the market today.

However, other vendors are able to compete in this field quite successfully as well either by adding IRM functionality into their existing platforms or by concentrating on delivering more secure, more comprehensive or even more convenient solutions to address specific customer needs.

A notable example of the former is Intralinks. In 2014, the company has acquired docTrackr, a French vendor with an innovative plugin-free IRM technology. By integrating docTrackr into their secure enterprise collaboration platform VIA, Intralinks is now able to offer seamless document protection and policy management to their existing customers. Another interesting solution is Seclore FileSecure, which provides a universal storage- and transport-neutral IRM extension for existing document repositories.

Among the vendors that offer their own IRM implementations one can name Covertix, which offers a broad portfolio of data protection solutions with a focus on strong encryption and comprehensive access control across multiple platforms and storage services. On the other end of the spectrum on can find vendors like Prot-On, which focus more on ease of use and seamless experience, providing their own EU-based cloud service to address local privacy regulations.

For more in-depth information about leading vendors and products in the file sharing and collaboration market please refer to KuppingerCole’s Leadership Compass on Secure Information Sharing.