Oracle IRM, the official blog

Well 2009 is surely giving us in Oracle many reasons to justify the use of our IRM solution. An interesting study surfaced today which highlights that "49 percent of respondents whose companies have been affected by a data breach said that one or more of the breaches involved the loss or theft of paper, not electronic, documents."

This is a fascinating report, full of evidence that many organizations are concerned paper documents are out of their control. The report states that; "71% of participants in our study are aware of an incident in which sensitive or confidential paper documents were lost or misplaced in their organization and 53% believe that employees are putting them at risk at communal printers, in meeting rooms or at meetings held outside the office."

Detail is given into methods for ensuring sensitive documents need to be shredded, access to the physical copies need to be managed and it states that "In general, organizations are better able to govern the use, protection and disposal of electronic documents than paper documents." Yes and what would be ideal is a technology that allows them to control those electronic documents so that printed versions cannot be made or at least some policy is applied to the ability to print. Another interesting question they ask is;

What departments or functions within your organization are most at risk for not being able to protect or secure paper documents?

The top three departments here are the main areas we sell Oracle IRM into, it is only missing the board of directors as a "department". The cost of the loss of these documents is also studied, "Approximately 46% of those surveyed estimate that the financial impact is between $10 million to $30 million per year. As shown in Bar Chart 11, the top three root causes of this financial loss are personal information about customers, loss of competitive information and loss of trade secrets."

Only 6% of those surveyed were concerned about the content whilst it resided in its electronic format. Really? So if this survey group could control the creation of the paper versions, infact stop people printing all together, it would be a massive reduction in risk!

They even asked the survey participants what the recommended methods are that organizations can take to protect confidential and sensitive documents?

• Strict enforcement of non-compliance with document handling and disposal procedures.
  
• Shredding machines that are easily accessible by employees.
  
• Senior level executive support.
  
• Ample budget to manage and control sensitive paper documents.
  
• Rigorous compliance of procedures for monitoring document protection and safe disposal.
  
• Establish accountability to business unit leaders to secure paper documents and files.
  

Now surely the best recommendation of all is... DON'T LET THEM PRINT IT! If this information is so sensitive, why on earth would an organization allow users the ability to create printed copies? Oracle IRM is the perfect technology to help with this problem. It provides the ability to limit who can print documents. So you can continue to distribute the content in its native format (XLS, DOC, PDF, HTML, Emails etc) but stop people from making paper copies in the first place.

For those who still have valid business use cases for printing the information, Oracle IRM can add dynamic watermarks into the documents which would contain information like username, IP addresses, filenames, document classification.

So if you look at the plethora of statistics in this report and used Oracle IRM to protect and control the ability to print information you would improve your confidence in securing your most sensitive information by 71%!! Now isn't that worth doing?