The popular automated document sealing tool from Martin Lambert, Oracle IRM inventor and founder, has just been updated with significant new functionality. Support for the Java sealing API that was recently shipped with the latest release of the Oracle IRM technology has been added.

Continuing our theme on DLP and IRM, we've been working with leading DLP vendor Sophos to create integrations that bring IRM and DLP together.

Another question from a colleague - suppose a user receives documents from two or more IRM services - how does the user switch between documents? Does the user need to manually log out of one service and log in to another so that the correct rights and restrictions apply? Do you need to clear your rights cache out to make way for the second service's rights, and repeat this process each time you want to switch back and forth between services?

Not at all.

A colleague has been asking for some information about IRM auditing, so I thought I'd turn the response into a blog entry for the benefit of all.

To summarise, a critical element of the Oracle IRM solution is the insight it provides into the usage of your sensitive information assets - even while they are being used by external users.

The IRM Desktop can create audit records for a number of activities including:

Great progress is being made here at integrating many DLP vendors with our information rights management (IRM) document security solution. Keep an eye out over the coming months for some sneak previews into this work.

One of my favourite sources of IT news and information is The Register, a UK based IT news related website that is written with style and often makes what can be a dull subject of IT, compelling reading.

A few years ago Intel had an employee walk out the door with their intellectual property and take it to AMD, Intel estimated the value of the information was close to $1

Among the key benefits of Oracle IRM is the tracking of external communications, so I thought it might be interesting to summarise a few facts and figures about our evaluation service - which is, after all, a publicly accessible self-registration IRM service.

Oracle has been running the service for about 3 years now, and it has been used by about 3000 users. So, there are at least 3000 copies of our demo documents out there somewhere - but who is using them currently, and where?

Activity galore at the moment, a new release of IRM 11g in the past month, the IRM Wrapper utility was born and released and now an update to the very useful HotFolders application. A feature request from a few days ago has already been written into the handy tool, allowing an integration of the IRM Wrapper and HotFolders.

It has been an amazingly busy year so far and I only get to write about 25% of the posts I would really like to put on this blog. Oracle has made more acquisitions in the security space, Sun adding a massive amount of new security technology and the recent database firewall technology from Secerno.

Interesting initial results from a data security survey run by information security research and analysts Securosis is showing inform

In an Oracle IRM workshop in Europe this week one of the talented Sun security architects, Rene Klomp, who is now part of our security group found a few issues when working with the Oracle IRM Hot Folders application.

With lots of partners now starting to work with the Oracle IRM 11g release with customers, i'm often asked about the tasks involved in an initial IRM deployment. What do customers need to be prepared for? What timescales are involved for getting the service up and running?

Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index

If you follow this blog you will already have a good idea of what Oracle Information Rights Management (IRM) does. By encrypting documents Oracle IRM secures and tracks all copies of those documents, everywhere they are shared, stored and used, inside and outside your firewall.

Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index

Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index

Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index

Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index

Just released is the latest version of the market leading document security technology from Oracle.

One of the main leak prevention controls that customers are looking for is clipboard control. After all, there is little point in controlling access to a document if authorised users can simply make unprotected copies by use of the cut and paste mechanism.

Oddly, for such a fundamental requirement, many solutions only offer very simplistic clipboard control - and require the customer to make an awkward choice between usability and security.

In many cases, clipboard control is simply an ON-OFF option.

Another significant change in Oracle IRM 11g is that we now use XML to create the tamperproof header for each sealed document. This article explains what this means, and what benefit it offers.

So, every sealed file has a metadata header that contains information about the document - its classification, its format, the user who sealed it, the name and URL of the IRM Server, and much more.

Another innovation in Oracle IRM 11g is an in-built privacy policy challenge. By design, one of the many things that Oracle IRM does, of course, is collect audit information about how and where sealed documents are being used - user names, machine identifiers and so on. Many customers consider that this has privacy implications that the user should be invited to accept as a condition of service use - for the protection of both of the user and the service from avoidable controversy.

One thing an Information Rights Management technology should do well is separate out three main areas of responsibility.

• The business process of defining and controlling the classifications to which content is secured and the definition of the roles employees, customers, partners and contractors have when accessing secured content.

Acquiring the Information Rights Management technology in 2006 was part of Oracle's strategic security vision and IRM complements nicely the overall Oracle security set of solutions. A year ago I spoke about how Oracle has solutions that can help companies protect information throughout its entire life cycle.

In amongst all the end of year activity we've been able to start the creation of some new YouTube video's of the Oracle IRM 11g release. First on the agenda was to show the core features of Oracle IRM with the new 11g server.

We also created a demonstration of the simple ways content can be secured without any training on the end users part and without impacting their existing day to day practice of using sensitive information. Have a look at this video...