While you may recognize that Enterprise Digital Rights Management (EDRM) is what your enterprise needs to keep your data safe, you may be looking for feedback from others in the industry who has implemented it. To ensure your EDRM implementation goes well, we want to highlight a few key points to keep in mind at different stages of your implementation process.

Preparation:

While many people may consider the Preparation phase to be a part of the planning phase, or the two even being one and the same, the preparation should not be overlooked. Often the poor implementation of EDRM can be attributed to a lack of or poor preparation.

This stage is the equivalent of laying out all your ingredients before cooking. Before you even start planning your implementation, take the time to identify and log what your specific use cases are, what kind of content does your organization work with and what kind of support does it need, and distinguishing between your internal and external users.

Taking the time to prepare, document, and visualize your systems beforehand will help to ensure that the planning and implementation of your EDRM system will be able to proceed smoothly.

Planning:

Using the information you have prepared in the previous step; you should be able to create a simple and comprehensive plan to implement EDRM within your enterprise. But, to ensure that the implementation succeeds you want to make sure that your plan is realistic.

Ensure that you keep the plan for first steps of your implementation small and simple, do not be unrealistic with how much you want to do. Focus on small use cases, and a few asset types before expanding to the rest of your business.

You also must figure out what to do with all your current system. You must prepare some sort of bulk protection of legacy content. Also, in case of disaster, you must prepare a method of data recovery by maintaining the correct procedures.

Once all of that is planned out, the final steps before the actual implementation should be to create and document the specific procedures for your implementation, making sure every person knows what they should be doing for each stage of development. This also means that you should prepare your staff members and users by initiating a sort of user training to ensure that they understand the basics of data protection and what is achievable with EDRM.

Implementation:

After planning, the implementation phase starts. While you may have already prepared and planned for this, it is important to keep the following in mind:

  • Your users may not understand EDRM technology right away, but they will understand the need for it. You can help simplify this by automating your policy enforcement and provide a simple user guide to clarify features.
  • Do not completely abandon your previous access policies if they worked, instead, take what was successful from your previous security and apply it to your new EDRM system. Don’t think of EDRM as a replacement for your security system but an upgrade from your previous model.
  • Grow your EDRM implementation over time. Implementation will take time; you won’t be able to do everything at once. Focus on maximizing protection for your most confidential data first, and then begin to roll out your implementation in stages.