Is your information management as good as Amazon?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Amazon’s withdrawal of ebooks by George Orwell seems positively Orwellian; ‘owners’ of the ebooks on Kindle woke up last week to discover that they should have read the small print. All they had was a licence for the ebooks and when it turned out that the publisher didn’t have the rights to sell that licence to Amazon to sell on to customers , Amazon revoked the licences and issued automatic refunds. A seamless if disturbing experience that proves that one cheap ebook reader from Elonex does not a mass market make. But if you needed to update a company price list or redact internal guidelines, could you do it with anything approaching the same efficiency?
A rich permissions-based licence system (as opposed to a simple encrypted, here’s one key and don’t lose it DRM system) gives content owners a lot of control. A writer could give away a free chapter with a discount code, give away a 3-month ready copy that you had to pay to keep or have their backlist turn free for a month every year or whatever incentive model they wanted to try out – and they could change it if it didn’t work. Can you even block last month’s price list from being sent out by accident?
The Windows Rights Management service in Windows Server is a start, coupled with Office and SharePoint (one of the reasons Google Docs isn’t as scary to Microsoft as the free Office 2010 Web apps might make you think). Keep pricelists in a SharePoint library set to expire after 30 days and people will have to go to a lot more trouble (extracting and resaving the information) to use out of date prices than to get current ones. Sure people can photograph the screen or read the document out to an accomplice over the phone. At that point you’re dealing with malicious behaviour rather than the simple desire to do your job that is responsible for the majority of information leaks and technology isn’t the right solution. But if you’re doing modern security and reperimeterisation (the perimeter isn’t gone, it’s just around the data itself), you need to think about information in terms of rights and licences, not bits and bytes and firewalls.
-Mary
Not yet rated
Loading ...Make a comment
Tag cloud
Archives
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
Most commented posts
- Java's SSVAGENT.EXE: training the monkey
22 comments
- The ColdFusion Renaissance
- Chrome OS: what happens when "always connected", isn't?
- Responsible disclosure? Not quite, VMware
- There’s a reason smartphones are locked down
- At sixes and Windows 7s
- Supporting iPhones and Exchange? Today could be a very bad day...
- The LHC isn
- When the fat lady sings for the mobile web, is it the end of the Opera Mini?
- Wubi Tuesday
Highest Rated Blog Posts
- Songs of distant satellites (100%)
- Nobody knows what Web 2.0 really is (100%)
- Log in and lock in (100%)
- Top tips for speeding up Vista (100%)
- Mommy, why is there a home server in the office? (100%)
- Employees are our most valuable asset (snigger) (100%)
- Locking down IT or blocking creativity (100%)
- Consumer BlackBerrys are good for business (100%)
- HD Trek (100%)
- Join the (beta) community (100%)