DLP Vendors Partnering with DRM Vendors

Dominic White

 

DLP Vendors Partnering with DRM Vendors

First RSA with Microsoft, then McAfee with Liquid Machines. It makes sense, especially for companies wanting to get proactive about preventing data loss. Although, what DRM (Digital Rights Management)/ERM (Enterprise Rights Management) doesn't have that DLP (Data Loss/Leak Prevention) does is the simplicity. It relies on user's pro-actively protecting their data, something we know we aren't good at. Sure, the DLP solution is there for when they don't, but then what's the point of the ERM solution? I'm playing devil's advocate a bit here, and am not committed to that position. It is interesting to note that there hasn't been much partnership between DLP vendors and other 'data focused' security products such as database activity monitoring (DAM) or data backup vendors and only limited partnership with encryption solutions. ERM seems to fit well from a marketing point of view, but I think there are some key integration points between the other solutions that can provide an easier security onion (aka defense in depth).

Thursday, December 4. 2008
Posted by Dominic White in Security
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#1 jock wrote (Link) (Reply)
Posted on Thursday, December 4. 2008
I think that the move to combine DRM and DLP is a good one as it helps to connect the two through the one weak point in the organisation - the user. I will confess that I am not aware of Liquid Motion, but the RSA / MS paring using WRM does start making it easy for the end user to use DLP tools as the tool is now integrated into the on application that they all use daily - Office. The end user awareness and training need will still be vast, but I like the one answer we have already: User: "How do we do it?" Trainer: "In office..." Structured data is a lot easier to protect in its structured form - it is when it becomes unstructured (email, reports, spreadsheets etc.) that the challenge starts and that is where I see these joint ventures potentially playing a part. In the case of the MS integration, imagine having infrastructure that is already aware of your enterprise classification and protection policies? A big challenge that I see is taking the above and integrating it with your corporate Enterprise Content Management initiative as it will undoubtedly on a technology that you will need a connector / adapter / plug-in / enhancement (insert big dollar custom code term here) for integration. That said, the potential is huge... I'll carry on my thoughts on this with an entry on www.forrester.co.za.
 

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