Oracle Information Rights Management

Security solutions that are poorly designed and difficult to use don't work, if security presents a significant hurdle for user adoption, it simply won't get used and people will just workaround it.

With this in mind, I had an excellent meeting this week with a customer interested in Oracle IRM. Right from the start they commented that whatever information rights management solution they implement, it must be simple and easy for end users and the business to use and deploy. This is exactly the opinion we have when developing Oracle IRM. We've built a solution which gives the customer the ability to balance all three.

Sometimes people spend so much time wanting to understand how our crypto works, how long the keys are, how do we ensure the security of the content when it's decrypted and passed to the rendering application and how good the screen capture functionality is. These are all very important technical issues which we address, yet it is just as important to understand how the powerful classification model, the transparent synchronization of rights, separation of rights from content, ability to search in sealed content, all contribute to an easy to use and effective to manage technology.

Experience this for yourself, just go have a look at the easy to use self service Oracle IRM demonstration.

A customer recently asked how do they handle the following;

A document which is in IRM protected folder A is now moved to IRM protected folder B. In such a case what will happen to the classification tied to the document? Will the earlier classification remain with the document or the document will now inherit the new classification which is B.

The customer is looking at using our Hot Folders functionality which monitors folders for new files and automatically seals them to the correct classification. The problem is, what happens if a user moves a sealed document from one Hot Folder to another?

Oracle IRM Hot Folders can be configured to associate different classifications with the A and B folders and then take one of several alternative actions if it encounters a file sealed to the A context in the B folder:

• It can warn (to the log) and do nothing. This is the default.
• It can quarantine the file to another folder.
• It can reseal the file to the B context.

In the last option the user account under which IRM Hot Folders is operating must have the appropriate rights in the source (A) and destination (B) contexts. Also - IRM Hot Folders (and the underlying IRM web services) only support resealing between contexts defined on the same IRM Server.

So it's the customer's choice as to what to do, no need to write any code, just configure the software.

Last week we had a great attendance to our online webcast. For those that were not able to attend and would like to listen at their own pace, an archive of the webcast is available.

We do however have another webcast on Thursday, Dec. 3, 2009 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET, so if you want to ask me any questions feel free to register.