EMC moves into IRM

EMC has made a bid for the information rights management market with the launch of its Documentum IRM server.

The product authenticates a user, authorises and determines users’ level of access to a document, audits the use of the document, and encrypts the document using RSA technology.

Based on policy settings and the user’s clearance, a document could offer access to a single page for a lower employee or the entire document for C-level management, senior systems engineer, Andy Hood, said.

The time an employee had access to a document, as well as the security rating of a document over time, could also be controlled, he said.

Citing Enterprise Strategy Group research, EMC managing consultant, Paul Ricketts, said only 18 percent of CIOs had enough faith in employees and network firewalls to be convinced that their company data was secure.

“For the rest, controlling data integrity and confidentiality is a big concern,” he said. “Organisations are absolutely getting freaked out by compliance legislation. Directors, C-level staff all have a direct interest in IRM to stop staff from sending out information.”

While compliance concerns were driving much of the market activity around data security, executive information leaks, intellectual property theft, loss or theft of sensitive customer data and email protection and discovery, meant IRM had much wider appeal, Ricketts said.

The Documentum IRM offering supports documents in Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF, Outlook and Lotus Notes. The offering does not however support open source formats such as StarOffice and OpenOffice, he said.

According to marketing director Jordan Reizes, EMC was now making a serious bid for the security market and was now building security into all its products. There were now 39 points that EMC has to meet in terms of security requirements when producing new products.

“EMC has spent $US10 billion in acquisitions and R&D over the last 10 years. We will spend $US1.2 billion this year on R&D… to make information central to our customer’s infrastructure,” he said.

“Firewalls are natural now even for use in the home, IRM as a protection strategy will be the same,” Reizes said.