I was just completing an RFP for a customer and had to write an exectutive summary of Oracle IRM. I thought it provided a nice, fairly concise message about how this technology works, so here it is!
Oracle IRM executive summary
Oracle IRM has an outstanding record of successful deployments with clients. This is attributable both to the fundamental effectiveness of our product and to our effectiveness at guiding clients through their implementation. The Oracle IRM solution has been developed over the past ten years. Through informed decisions and listening to feedback from customers, our latest offering provides a second to none ability to secure, control and track information. What follows are some important statements to be made about Oracle’s IRM solution and the experience we have gained through our history so far.The diagram below explains the eternal triangle of IRM. To successfully implement any solution of this nature requires a balance of security, usability and manageability. Any solution which focuses too heavily on security is often hard to use and unmanageable. Likewise, concentrating too much on making the product easy to use and transparent to the end user often results in security flaws. Oracle IRM’s strong technical solution to the three areas below, combined with our professional services engagements, leads to very successful deployments that balance the three areas within our customer’s organization.
The next diagram shows the components of the Oracle IRM technology. Central is the IRM Server where all information about users, their rights to content, the decryption keys, etc are stored. Classification policies (contexts) are then created on the server and user accounts are added with rights to these policies. Content is then encrypted (sealed) against a server and distributed to the end user who opens the information, authenticates with the server and, if they have been authorized, retrieves the rights to the document. These rights are then cached locally on the user’s computer allowing them to continue using the documents and e-mails even when they are offline and not connected to a network.
The ability to transparently work offline is an example of one of the usability issues that Oracle has paid a lot of attention to, because it is critical for wide-spread enterprise use. In cases where the end user does not have rights to the information they are redirected to a web server and given rich, contextual information about their current status.
All of the information about this activity (even offline use) is then received by the IRM Server and is accessible either via the management tools or via logs/API’s that allow integration with other reporting applications.
In summary, Oracle IRM is the most mature technology of its kind in the market place. We have the most experience in not only the technical aspects of deploying but more importantly we understand how the business is affected when implementing IRM. With the acquisition into Oracle we now can leverage the industries most powerful and advanced technologies such as the identity management solutions, content management systems and the wide range of enterprise applications.
