[FDE] Enterprise Right Management vs. Traditional Encryption Tools

[Garrett M. Groff]

Not claiming to be an expert here, but I'd say it depends on the particular 
organization's needs, including such factors such as price, ease of use, 
ease of deployment, ease and flexibility of central management, etc.

Not sure if rights mgmt protects against the kinds of things that FDE 
protects against (like protecting against juicy information appearing in the 
page files), but the comprehensive nature of the security solution might 
play a role as well. I'm thinking that RM would do a better job protecting 
against people sending secret docs via email (due to carelessness or 
malice), whereas FDE (or file-based encryption like EFS) protects the data 
due to physical theft of a computer, external drive, USB flash memory, etc.

Above all, a data security solution must be convenient and extensible. If 
not, people won't use it, or won't adhere to it. "Transparent" encryption 
options (again, FDE, EFS, etc) provide a nice option for a lot of people. 
I'm assuming there are RM suites that are reasonably transparent to 
end-users. If so, adoption and greater security of business and consumer 
data is more likely.

In conclusion, I'm not sure that it matters which data security solution an 
organization chooses to adopt, provided that that solution provides 
sufficient protection and a reasonable level of convenience for the 
end-user.

- Garrett

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ali, Saqib" <docbook.xml at gmail.com>
To: "Cryptography" <cryptography at metzdowd.com>; <FDE at www.xml-dev.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2007 1:16 PM
Subject: [FDE] Enterprise Right Management vs. Traditional Encryption Tools


>I was recently asked why not just deploy a Enterprise Right Management
> solution instead of using various encryption tools to prevent data
> leaks.
>
> Any thoughts?
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