As the manager of an enterprise, you would have plenty of information that is viewed and accessed by various authorized users across your organization. Such content is often shared via PDF documents that are encrypted during transit to the recipient.
However, once the recipient decrypts the file and opens it, he or she can possibly do anything with the data. And, what if the user starts copying the content by taking multiple screen grabs into an application like Word? How can you prevent the user from forwarding or sharing your confidential documents with unauthorized users?
Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls is the way to go. Your encryption will not be of much use if it is not supported by DRM which helps you control what the licensed users can do with your documents. So, a PDF DRM security solution provides copy protection for your documents, whether they are important reports, eBooks, files, training content or any other type of document.
It may be impossible to restrict your authorized users from sharing your documents. But, you can use DRM controls with encryption to ensure that, even if a licensed user forwards a document to an unauthorized person, the recipient will receive the document in an encrypted format. Thus, the unauthorized recipient of your sensitive information documents will be unable to do anything with them.
The DRM system will also not allow your users to share their authorization (license) to access the documents. However, some users will still find ways to copy and paste your content to share it. It is here that the DRM controls to disallow screen grabbing or copy and pasting can help keep your information secure.
Another major problem is the users’ ability to print copies of your document and then share the hard copies. So, how can you avoid this? One way is to disable printing for all your authorized users. But, it may not always be feasible to do so and you may be required to allow printing. In such cases, you can apply DRM controls to restrict the number of copies each user can print or even prevent the use of file drivers.
If you allow printing then you cannot prevent your users from photocopying and then sharing the information. So, the best solution to control printing is to use non-removable dynamic watermarks that will display parameters, such as the username, email address, company name, date and time stamp, on the printed copy. This helps to deter information leakage since no one would like their identity to be revealed, while they are sharing sensitive information with unauthorized people.
This type of DRM control is likely to stop authorized users from printing, copying, and forwarding critical documents. Thus, there are various ways in which DRM software can help you copy protect your PDF documents.
But, you have to implement the right DRM controls to stop document sharing, forwarding, printing, and copying.
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