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The more technology progresses, the more susceptible your business becomes to security and document leaks. Though cloud computing makes easier collaboration and accessibility, doing so without an IRM (Information Rights Management) service could be detrimental to your business, and to the safety and privacy of your employees, and clients. IT support in Houston can help you bounce back from security breaches, but protecting yourself beforehand ensures that your sensitive information remains secure.
What is Information Rights Management (IRM)?
Information Rights Management, more commonly known as IRM, is an enhanced encryption solution developed by Microsoft. By using permissions, authorization, encryptions, and advanced security keys, your sensitive information is kept secure and remains out of the hands of potentially untrustworthy people or organizations. The restrictions that you apply to a file or a document move with it wherever it goes, thus limiting file accessibility to those who have the password or encryption key.
How Does an IRM Solution Work?
By encrypting downloaded files, limits to who can access, and decrypt the files, and/or folders are set. The solution allows you to set specific read and/or write permissions on documents, which helps you to protect the file from being printed, edited, or copied by anyone that hasn’t been granted write privileges. When applying IRM to a document or to a file, a security certificate is created and attached to the file. Specific software and applications that run with the cloud and IRM, such as Microsoft Office, connect back to the IRM solution and determines if the credentials entered are valid. Once they have been verified, the file or the document is decrypted. IT support in Houston could use IRM methods to encrypt their files for security measures.
Key IRM Features
When looking into an IRM solution for your business, it’s important to understand all of the features that come with the solution you’re seeking; to ensure it has everything that you need. Consulting with an IT experts equips you with the understanding and knowledge that you’re seeking. Some of the key features that you can expect are:
- The ability to configure privacy settings in individual document libraries
- Freedom to set access and privilege rights, such as granting the ability to read, write, edit, copy, and print.
- Mark your document with an expiration date to determine a cut-off of when the document can be accessed.
- Create protection for group documents and individual documents, as well as provide encryption for PDF files.
As helpful as an IRM solution is, it’s vital for you to keep in mind that it can’t protect you from absolutely everything. Computer viruses, keystroke loggers, spyware, and trojan horses have the ability to corrupt your file and steal information. The IRM solution also cannot protect your files from manual copying, typing, and screen capturing programs from third-party applications. If you find your business’s confidential information’s at risk, an IT support company in Houston, such as ICS, can help you with your various information technology and security needs. Contact us for more information on the services we provide and how we can help your business further. You can also find out more about Information Rights Management (IRM) solutions.
Further reading
ICS is a Texas-based 40-year-old technology company specializing in Managed IT, VoIP, Video Conferencing and Video Surveillance solutions for US and International businesses. ICS has over 4000 regional installations and specializes in multi-site businesses between 25 and 2500 employees. ICS’s customers enjoy the experience of ICS’s Total Care program which provides clients flat fee services with obsolescence and growth protection. Whether a customer elects to deploy their IT, Video Conferencing or VoIP in the cloud or on the customer’s premise, ICS can provide a full turn-key solution for our clients under one flat monthly fee.