During the last few months, we have seen – especially here in Europe – a massive increase in demand for methods to securely share information, beyond the Enterprise. The challenge is not new. I have blogged about this several times, for instance here and here.
While there have been offerings for Information Rights Management or Enterprise Rights Management for many years - from vendors such as Microsoft, Adobe, Documentum or Oracle, plus some smaller players such as Seclore - we are seeing a lot of action on that front these days.
The most important one clearly is the general availability of Microsoft Azure RMS (Rights Management Services), with some new whitepapers available. I have blogged about this offering before, and this clearly is a game changer for the entire market not only of rights management, but the underlying challenge of Secure Information Sharing. Microsoft also has built an ecosystem of partners that provide additional capabilities, including vendors such as Watchful Software or Secude, the latter with a deep SAP integration to protect documents that are exported from SAP. And these are just two in a remarkably long list of partners that help Microsoft in making Azure RMS ready for the heterogeneous IT environments customers have today.
Aside of the Microsoft Azure RMS ecosystem, some other players are pushing solutions into the market that can work rather independently, somewhat more the way Seclore does. Two vendors to mention here are Nextlabs and Covertix. These are interesting options, especially (but not only) when there is a need for rapid, tactical solutions.
Other vendors that are worth a look in this market for Secure Information Sharing include Brainloop and Grau Data. Both are German vendors, but there are other solutions available in other countries and regions. These focus primarily on providing a space to exchange data, while the others mentioned above focus more on data flowing rather freely, by protecting these documents and their use “in motion” and “in use”.
The current momentum – and the current demand – are clear indicators for a fundamental shift we see in Information Security and for Information Stewardship. In fact, all these solutions focus on enabling information sharing and allow users to share information in a secure but controlled way. This is in stark contrast to the common approach within IAM (Identity and Access Management) and IAG (Identity and Access Governance), where the focus is on restricting access.
Secure Information Sharing enables sharing, while the common approaches restrict access to information on particular systems. So it is about enabling versus restricting, but also about an information-centric approach (protect information that is shared) versus a system-centric concept (restrict access to information that resides on particular systems).
With the number of solutions available today, from point solutions to a comprehensive platform with broad support for heterogeneous environments – Microsoft Azure RMS – there are sufficient options for organizations to move forward towards Secure Information Sharing and enabling business users to do their job while keeping Governance, Compliance, and Information Risks in mind. Regardless of the business case, there are solutions available now for Secure Information Sharing.
It is time now for organizations to define a strategy for Secure Information Sharing and to move beyond restricting access. More on this at EIC Munich 2014.