By More and more companies are moving to online and cloud-based data management and document sharing in modern business. Many new benefits and challenges arise with the influx of companies making an online presence. One of these challenges is the security of sensitive documents and data. When your company shares documents with another enterprise or person, you’ll need to know that your information is secure, whether from the other organization or other people online. That’s where digital rights management (DRM) technology comes into play. In this article, we’ll explore digital rights management and how it applies to your business.
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What is digital rights management?
Digital rights management is a combination of technology and a set of policies and procedures designed to control access to digital documents. DRM allows organizations to restrict access to sensitive documents from unauthorized users, prevent files from being modified, and monitor file usage. DRM software also encodes your files with access control settings that the document owner or copyright holder specifies. DRM software gives you and your company complete control over how you share documents, how they’re used, edited, copied, and even whether or not someone can print the document.
As a result, you can control documents even after sharing them with another person or enterprise, ensuring the document is governed by the person who created it. Currently, DRM software is commonly found in the entertainment and publishing industries. However, more businesses recognize the utility and advantages that DRM has to offer businesses of any size or industry.
How does DRM software work?
The functionality of DRM can be broken down into two types of protection for your business files. These two categories are copy protection and permission management. Copy protection prevents any unauthorized users from making copies of a file or the contents within. For example, if you provide a user with access to a document, DRM can prevent them from copying the document, portions of the document, and printing the document. This protection is achieved through file encryption.
Your DRM software will scramble the contents of the file in question so that the software is the only way to access the file and its contents. How this encryption works in action is that if you share a file through your DRM software with another organization, such as your company’s financial documents with an accounting firm, they can view the document. However, if they try to download the document, their computer system will not know how to access the encrypted data.
As a result, the download will fail, protecting your data from being stored or shared without your permission. In addition, DRM software provides another layer of copy protection through digital watermarks. Should an unauthorized user attempt to screenshot a document as a workaround for the download encryption, a digital watermark appears on each page with their email and IP addresses.
Finally, permission management is the other side of DRM’s file protection. Permission management simply gives your enterprise control over who has access to a digital file and how they can use it. These permissions include whether the user can view, copy, print, edit, or download a file. Furthermore, if a user has access to download the file, and you revoke that access later, they will not have access to the document, even after they’ve downloaded it.
DRM technology is the solution to your company’s file protection and security needs.
Whether your organization needs to share financial documents, medical files, confidentiality agreements, or any other sensitive data, file protection is crucial for your business’s security. DRM software from a company like Caplinked provides the data privacy protection you need. Caplinked’s DRM software solutions require zero plug-ins, providing seamless file viewing in-browser with a more secure connection. If your organization needs to share sensitive documents with internal or external sources, DRM software is the solution to your privacy needs.
