NextPage Controlling Information Risk Series

Information Risk Management (IRM) offers an effective approach for preventing your enterprise’s intellectual property from falling into malicious hands. It is ideally suited for situations where end users can realistically be required to invest significant effort in return for tight restrictions on who can read, modify, copy or print a document.

In some cases, the IRM approach may also be appropriate for enforcing document retention and disposition policies. However, if you are evaluating IRM for that purpose, you should carefully consider the consequences and tradeoffs, which this guide will help you identify and evaluate.

As a first step in your evaluation, you should decide whether the following need scenarios are important to your enterprise. They were selected to help determine whether IRM is appropriate for an organization. Some potential consequences of using IRM for document policy enforcement are summarized in the table below and discussed in the “Will IRM Work for You?” section of this document.