What is IRM (Information Rights Management)?

IRM (Information Rights Management)

IRM stands for Information Rights Management, which is an authentication and protection technology that works on the desktop level with Microsoft Office programs. The purpose of IRM is to prevent unauthorized use or reproduction of important information in Office files like Excel workbooks, Word documents, or Outlook e-mail messages.

IRM works in conjunction with Rights Management Services (RMS) to help protect documents and messages in an organization from unauthorized use or distribution. When a user applies IRM permissions to a document, these permissions are portable; that is, the IRM protection information travels with the file wherever it may go. This means that user access privileges for a file will hold even if the file is distributed beyond an organization’s local network.

Excel workbooks and other Office documents are often distributed as e-mail attachments or shared on a document server. If you need to restrict access to a shared file so only a few select users can work with it, you can use IRM protection.

When someone protects an Excel file (or other document) with IRM it will be encrypted, meaning encoded in a way that is unintelligible. The program that you typically use to view or edit the file (Excel in this case) must be IRM enabled, and your computer must be a trusted, authorized user in the RMS system before the protected file can be opened.

If you are verified by your company’s RMS system as a trusted user and you have been authorized to use the file, the file will be decrypted and Excel will be able to open it. Anyone that is not a trusted user on the company’s system will not be able to open the file. Moreover, anyone that has not been granted usage permissions for the file will not be able to open it.