Information Rights Management Service

• Introduction
• How does IRM help?
• Training schedule
• Prerequisites for staff in using IRM

Introduction

In the past few years, a number of security breach incidents were related to loss of personal data that had been left unprotected.  While the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Project helps in mitigating the risk of losing unencrypted data kept on USB flash drives, providing a convenient means for staff members of the University to protect personal data and other important data in their work has continued to be an uneasy task being tackled by ITS.

We are pleased to announce that ITS is now implementing an Information Rights Management (IRM) solution based on Microsoft Azure Rights Management Service that will enable us to have a tool that is relatively easy to use for encrypting files that need to be kept and shared so as to better contain the risk of leaking personal data and/or sensitive information due to unexpected distribution of the related documents.   The service of the IRM solution will be generally available for use by University staff members who have such needs, starting from January 2017.

How does IRM help?

Generally, we would lose the control of a document (a file or an email message) after it is dispatched.  With IRM, we can have a means to protect its access by the designated recipient(s) in prescribed ways.  In summary, the IRM solution supports the following granular protections:

• Disable further forwarding of a mail message (after it is sent using Microsoft Outlook or webmail email programs)
• Disable further copy-and-paste and print/fax processing of a Microsoft Office document
• Restrict viewing/updating of a Microsoft Office document only to specified recipients
• Set access expiry date for a document
• Track the access history of a shared document (not applicable to email messages)
• Revoke the recipient access rights to a shared document (not applicable to email messages)

Training schedule

To learn more about the IRM service, colleagues of the University are invited to attend the following training workshops that will be held in the coming months:

Upon request, we would also arrange to hold training workshops for departments which plan to deploy the IRM solution across their staff members for improved information/data protection.

Prerequisites for staff in using IRM

1. Installation of the Rights Management Sharing Application (“RMS App”) on PCs or the Azure Information Protection Viewer (“AIP Viewer App”) on mobile platforms to effect the following functions-

• protection and sharing (through email) on Windows platform
• in-place protection of files on Windows platform
• view protected documents
• usage tracking on shared documents
• access revocation of shared documents

2. Using Office 2013/2016 on Windows or Office 2016 on MacOS
    
3. Using Outlook to send and read IRM protected emails

Please refer to the IRM user document and the related FAQs for more details.

For enquiries, please contact the undersigned or ithelp@hku.hk.

KC Chang
Systems Team
Tel: 3917 7972
Email: kcchang@hku.hk