DRM 101: A Beginner's Guide to Protecting Your Business With Digital Rights Management

DRM 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Protecting Your Business With Digital Rights Management

With rising concerns over unauthorized access to sensitive content like contracts, customer data, patient records, trade secrets, and more, it’s evident a digital rights management (DRM) strategy is imperative for businesses to function and grow.

In this post, we’ll review the essentials of DRM, from foundational principles to advanced application strategies. A fundamental understanding of DRM is crucial in ensuring your valuable digital assets stay secure.

Wondering if digital rights management can protect your priceless intellectual property? The simple answer is yes but you’ll want to be sure to avoid these four DRM stumbling blocks.

Digital Rights Management Overview

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a set of access control technologies used by businesses to protect their digital content from unauthorized use or distribution. DRM not only protects businesses against the misuse of their digital assets but it also ensures compliance with data privacy standards and mitigates financial, legal, and reputational risk.

Why DRM is Important for Businesses

Digital rights management is critical for businesses because it enables companies to regulate how their content is accessed, shared, and used by end–users. By implementing DRM, businesses can ensure that their sensitive digital assets are consumed in a manner that aligns with their licensing agreements, usage policies, or regulatory compliance requirements.

DRM’s core value proposition lies in its ability to prevent unauthorized distribution and misuse of digital content. Misuse can include unauthorized sharing of digital content, illegal copying and distribution, and access by unlicensed users. The emergence of AI has created significant problems for businesses as their sensitive information is increasing ingested by AI and placed into large language models like GPT–3.

Fundamentals of DRM

Digital rights management encompasses a set of technologies aimed at protecting copyright content from unauthorized access and distribution. These technologies include encryption, digital watermarks, access controls, and more. These measures are designed to prevent unauthorized reproduction and distribution, control viewing, printing, and editing rights, and even dictate the lifespan of content.

By implementing DRM, businesses can control who accesses their content, when, and under what conditions. Otherwise, the loss of control over their intellectual property could result in significant financial losses, impacting their competitive advantage and brand.

Choosing the Right DRM Solution

Selecting the appropriate DRM solution requires a general understanding of what DRM can (and cannot) do as well as crystal clear view of your business’s specific needs. Considerations should include:

What sensitive digital assets does your business have?

  • Is the protection of these assets mandated by a compliance requirement or standard like GDPR, HIPAA, DPA 208, NIST CSF, ISO 27001, etc.?
  • Who has access to these assets?
  • Do they need access to these assets?
  • With whom externally do they share these assets?
  • Is there a business need for sharing these assets?
  • What protections are in place (if any) to protect these assets after they’re shared?

The DRM solution marketplace is crowded and competitive with each provider offering a unique set of features tailored to different kinds of digital content, use cases, and regulatory requirements. Businesses should also carefully consider the user experience; the DRM solution should be robust enough to protect your assets without being so onerous that it discourages employees or end users from opening or using the content. Ultimately, businesses should view their DRM purchase as an investment. For a digital rights management solution to be effective, it must not only align with current business operations but also be flexible enough to adapt to future changes in technology and market demands.

DRM Implementation Strategies

Successfully implementing a DRM solution involves much more than simply selecting a provider and applying their technology to your content. Implementing a DRM solution into your business requires a strategic approach, beginning with a thorough audit of your existing content distribution channels and security protocols. Consider how DRM fits into your overall content strategy and what changes will need to be made to accommodate this new layer of protection. Engage with stakeholders across your organization, including IT, legal, and content creation teams, to ensure that everyone understands the importance of DRM and the role these stakeholders play in the solution’s implementation.

It’s also crucial to communicate with your users about the changes they may experience as a result of a DRM solution implementation. Changes can range from new software requirements to potential limitations on how and where customers, employees, partners, and other end users can access your content. Clear communication helps businesses manage expectations and maintain a positive user experience.

Common DRM Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Implementing a DRM solution can be challenging, creating technical issues and push back from users. One common pitfall is selecting a DRM solution that is too restrictive, which can frustrate users and lead to a negative impact on content engagement. Employees may be forced to use a workaround that is inevitably less secure and therefore not compliant with relevant data privacy requirements. Businesses therefore should carefully balance the need for security with the importance of a positive user experience.

Another mistake is failing to properly communicate the reasons for implementing DRM to your employees and end users, which can lead to confusion, frustration, and resentment. Clear, transparent communication about how DRM protects PII, PHI, IP, and other sensitive content and benefits users can help mitigate this issue.

From a technical perspective, ensuring compatibility between your DRM solution and the myriad devices and platforms is crucial. Test your DRM–protected content across different devices and platforms to identify and resolve any compatibility issues before a wider rollout. Additionally, keep an eye on evolving DRM standards and technologies to ensure your solution remains effective and compliant with industry best practices.

For more DRM pitfalls, be sure to read: 4 Biggest Digital Rights Management Stumbling Blocks

Future Trends in DRM Technology

The DRM solution landscape is constantly evolving, shaped by legal, technological, and consumer trends. Recent advancements in blockchain technology, for example, have opened up new possibilities for DRM solutions that are more secure, transparent, and resistant to tampering. These decentralized DRM solutions could redefine content ownership and distribution in the coming years, offering unprecedented control to businesses.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is another area poised to influence the future of DRM. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, DRM solutions can become more adept at detecting and responding to unauthorized use of digital content. Ironically, this includes AI ingestion of copyrighted or other privileged information into large language models.

To learn more about protecting your sensitive content from AI ingestion, read: Building Trust in Generative AI with a Zero Trust Approach

Additionally, AI can enhance the user experience through adaptive content delivery, ensuring that DRM protections do not hinder legitimate consumption of sensitive content.

As these and other technologies mature, businesses will need to stay informed and ready to adapt their DRM strategies accordingly.

Kiteworks Helps Businesses Protect Their Sensitive Content With Next–generation DRM

Digital rights management (DRM) is an essential component of a modern business’s content strategy, protecting PII, PHI, and intellectual property assets from unauthorized use while ensuring that businesses maintain control over their distribution. DRM’s technical capabilities and features, its role in a regulatory context, and your business’ use cases, all require careful consideration and strategic planning. By avoiding common pitfalls and staying informed about future trends, businesses can implement an effective DRM strategy and solution that protects their content and supports their overall business objectives. As the digitization of sensitive content continues to grow, DRM will remain a critical tool for businesses, requiring them to protect this content from unauthorized use.

The Kiteworks Private Content Network, a FIPS 140-2 Level validated secure file sharing and file transfer platform, consolidates email, file sharing, web forms, SFTP and managed file transfer, so organizations control, protect, and track every file as it enters and exits the organization.

Kiteworks SafeEDIT is a next-generation digital rights management solution that empowers organizations to collaborate with trusted partners on confidential files without relinquishing source control.

Rather than transferring a document, Kiteworks SafeEDIT streams an editable file rendition, enabling remote co–authoring, co–editing, and seamless remote workflows. These streamed files function just like traditional documents, providing a native application experience for reading and writing files that makes collaboration easy, while the original file remains on the Kiteworks platform, behind the content owner’s firewall.

As with every other file that enters or leaves the organization through the Kiteworks Private Content Network, these file renditions are centrally controlled, secured, and tracked to protect sensitive content and demonstrate regulatory compliance with data privacy regulations and standards.

To learn more about the Kiteworks Private Content Network and how you can utilize SafeEDIT to balance the need for rigorous security and modern workflows, schedule a custom demo today.

Additional Resources

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