Active Directory Rights Management Services

Active Directory Rights Management Services

Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS), which earlier termed as Windows rights management services is one such type of information rights management that is utilized to encrypt and restrict access to corporate files. In fact, the functionality denial service is utilized on Microsoft Windows and nowadays widely used by many companies all across the world to encrypt information present in the form of documents, web pages and corporate e-mails. Apart from that, today the service is gaining its importance in preventing the decryption of protected content by specific groups or users so that certain operations on the encrypted documents such as copying, printing or editing can be prevented.

With the help of Active Directory rights management services and client, an organization’s security strategy can be augmented. This can be achieved by protecting the information store and for that it is important to impose usage policies and defend the crucial information like customer data, financial reports, etc.

Since AD RMS includes a Windows Server 2008 R2 based server running the AD RMS server role handling all the certificates, licensing, the database server and the RMS client, its usage can facilitate you with the following benefits:

• Encryption of sensitive information: It gets lot easier for organizations to create customized usage policy templates, which later can be applied to the information and protect them.
• Constant protection: For improved protection of information, AD RMS augments the existing perimeter based security solutions that also includes ACLs, firewalls, etc, by locking their usage rights.
• Flexible technology: AD RMS allows independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers to enable applications and services like the content management systems to safeguard the solutions that are server based such as e-mail gateways, record management, archival systems and automated workflows.

Given below are some of the key features of Active Directory rights management services:

• Identity federation support
• Microsoft federation gateway support
• Inclusion of AD RMS as a server role
• Administration through MMC (Microsoft Management Console)
• Integration with Active Directory Federation (AD FS)
• Self enrollment of AD RMS servers

Consequently, Active Directory rights management services is a format and application –technology that can be used to offer services for creating information safeguard solutions. Types of content which can be protected using AD RMS generally include e-mail messages, intranet websites and documents. Moreover, the service is very valuable to IT analysts and professionals who are responsible for supporting existing RMS infrastructure. Besides this, it is also helpful to IT security architects who set up information protection technology.