Enterprise digital rights management is software that puts the protection inside a file, so that the file stays protected after it has left the company. It is also called information rights management (IRM), or enterprise DRM. Only the people the company names can open the file, and only for the actions the company allows, such as viewing but not printing.
Most data security tools guard the company's own systems. Data loss prevention (DLP) decides whether a file may go out at all. But many files must go out. Designs go to suppliers, contracts go to lawyers, and board papers go to directors' own laptops. Once an ordinary file has been sent, the company has no control over it.
Take, for example, a pump manufacturer in Coimbatore that sends the drawings of a new impeller to a casting supplier. Before the file is sent, the rights management software encrypts it, which means it scrambles the file so that it can be read only with the right key. The software also attaches a policy to the file. Three named engineers at the supplier may view the drawing. Nobody may print it or copy from it. And access ends after 60 days.
When an engineer at the supplier opens the file, his viewer app contacts the manufacturer's rights management server. The server checks who he is and what the policy allows. If he is allowed, the server releases the key for this one session, and the drawing opens. Each opening is recorded, so the manufacturer can see who opened the file, and when.
Now say the supply contract ends after a month. The manufacturer changes the policy on its server. The next time anyone at the supplier tries to open the drawing, the server refuses to release the key. The file is still on the supplier's laptop, but nobody can read it. This is the main difference from a file protected with an ordinary password, which cannot be taken back once the password has been shared.
Rights management has limits. Someone who is allowed to view a file can still photograph the screen. So many tools print the viewer's name and the time across the page as a watermark, which makes a leaked photo traceable to the person who took it.
The keys themselves are kept by encryption key management. The files that need this protection are often found and labelled first by data security posture management (DSPM). Rights management is one of the older methods in data security: companies have used it to protect office documents since the early 2000s. The same idea is better known in films and music, where consumer DRM stops a bought song or film from being copied freely.