Liquid Machines & McAfee team up for total data protection

This week, enterprise rights management vendor, Liquid Machines [1] announced they were forming a partnership with McAfee's data loss prevention product DLP [2] to provide customers with complete data protection inside and outside the firewall. DLP provides network security to make sure sensitive data doesn't escape the firewall without you knowing about it, while Liquid Machines provides enterprise (also known as information) rights management (ERM) for documents whenever you share them with customers, partners, suppliers and so forth.

With ERM, document recipients need to download a small program (one time), which contacts your enterprise rights management server and makes sure the recipient is authorized to view the document. Because the document calls home periodically, it means you can expire obsolete documents and force the user to download the latest version, or simply let the document lapse and the recipient can no longer view it. This gives you total control over your content whenever you send it outside the company.

The deal makes a lot of sense because these two technologies are so complimentary. Perimeter protection like DLP provides protection to the edge, but no further. Liquid Machines covers documents after they leave the protection of the firewall. Neither is a perfect security answer, but together they help you protect your information about as well as you hope for.

For more information:
- see the Liquid Machines press release [3]
- see this EContent article [4] on IRM/ERM (links to a PDF)

Related Articles:
Survey finds more companies investing in rights management [5]
McAfee news from FierceCIO [6]