Digital rights management is a useful technology for today’s world, which includes the use of technology that restricts third-party actions with your digital assets. DRM can be used on any file, even video, audio, or images. Authors or publishers protect their copyrights with them, and companies can thus secure their data from unauthorized access and leakage. Today, VRM is one of the most important requirements of cybersecurity.
How digital rights management works
Digital rights management technology includes a set of codes that prohibit various actions with documents, such as copying, downloading, forwarding, editing, printing, screenshotting, etc. They also allow you to limit the time a digital asset can be viewed or the number of devices to which it will be available. In addition, creators and authors of various digital content can encrypt their material, and only those users with decryption keys can access it.
The DRM offers many different ways to protect your content, some of which have been described above. Other ways to protect your data are:
- Set document expiration dates. When the expiration date has passed, the content will be immediately blocked
- Limiting the number of uses per user. For example, you can set that one user is only allowed to access your document or other content ten times. And when he has exhausted all the permissions, he will be blocked from accessing the data
- Block access by IP address. For example, you can set that only the US users can see your data
- Setting a watermark. If one of your users was allowed to do more with the documents, watermarks help to make sure that their actions do not violate copyrights
How can DRM help during mergers and acquisitions?
Digital rights management used to be more of a priority for digital content creators. Still, companies need its capabilities as well, as digitalization has reached a point where most organizations worldwide have moved to online document storage and transactional formats. The most frequent digital transactions of the past few years have been mergers and acquisitions (M&A). These are quite complex transactions, a process that requires the most sensitive company data to be shared with stakeholders. An organization’s data becomes most vulnerable during due diligence because you can’t fully trace how and by whom it is used.
Digital rights management helps companies control access to sensitive data by enabling the secure sharing of the necessary information with potential partners while at the same time ensuring its integrity. Another benefit of DRM is that it makes detecting the source of a data breach easy.
Digital rights management makes the due diligence process several times safer, faster, and easier, contributing to increased success in closing the deal.
Why should companies use virtual data rooms?
Virtual data rooms are unique online spaces designed for mergers and acquisitions. These solutions utilize the most advanced security features, including DRM and data encryption, and many other features that allow administrators to control the level of confidentiality of their documents. In addition, is a licensed software with international security certifications and therefore has full rights to handle their customers’ sensitive data. Among other things, they provide an NDA agreement feature, robust physical security, and audit trails that allow for constant monitoring of what’s happening inside the VDR.