Another approach for extending corporate control to desktop documents involves encrypting individual corporate files—and then carefully controlling who can decrypt and use them. Modern encryption solutions, including digital rights management (DRM) technology, enable businesses to impose an impressive degree of control on individual corporate documents—regardless of where they’re stored. With DRM software, document owners can dictate exactly who is allowed to open documents, how long they remain active, how many times they can be copied or printed and much more. Modern encryption solutions do an excellent job of protecting the contents of sensitive corporate documents. They also provide a clear and complete audit trail, which is a must for any desktop document retention solution.
However, encryption solutions also require users to have the correct decryption software loaded on their computers. Without it, decrypted files become completely useless. This restriction often forces users to e-mail unencrypted files to customers, partners or other people who do not have access to the appropriate decryption software. Of course, this eliminates the security and document retention benefits of encrypting files in the first place.
Encryption solutions also force organizations to place all of their most important corporate information in the hands of a single encryption software vendor. If a particular vendor goes out of business or updates its technology, there can be serious, long-term implications for businesses that depend on the software. Moving to a single-vendor encryption model also runs counter to important industry trends toward more open, standardized file formats that ensure corporate documents can be opened and manipulated far into the future—regardless of the fate of any single software company.
Encryption certainly provides impressive, policy-based controls over corporate documents. But that control comes at a high cost—by requiring organizations to place all of their documents in the hands of a single software vendor and forcing every person who uses those files to have the correct decryption software installed on their computer.
