The overwhelming response by the media, bloggers, and consumers to Sidekick’s data loss earlier this month was the usual question: Whose fault is this? Many doubts were raised as to whether or not the cloud can be trusted with any valuable information.

What wasn’t addressed in the flurry of responses to the Sidekick news was any indication of a practical course of action. It ignores the two fundamental concerns that everyone shares: Consumers and business users have increasing volumes of data that need to be securely shared with authorized parties, as well as backed up for safe keeping.

The first problem of controlling data access is becoming increasingly complex to address, since information needs to be shared with new categories of users, sometimes outside of the data owner’s control. The second problem of backing up data lies not in the complexity but in volume.

Information Rights Management (IRM), also known as enterprise digital rights management, has always been the elusive silver bullet for IT organizations trying to protect intellectual property inside and outside the firewall.

By applying both encryption and permissioning capabilities to corporate information, IRM provides the core requirements to protect access to information. First, encryption capabilities ensure that no one is able to access information they are not authorized to see. Second, permissioning capabilities ensure that access authority can be defined based on an individual's role and need to access (view, print, edit etc.) the information.

It seems that not a day goes by without a news story breaking concerning the leak, theft, interception or misplacement of critical information.

In just the last few weeks:

We're swimming in a sea of documents - and there's research to prove it. When I recently re-read the 2008 Gartner Summit presentation "Understanding ECM and Its Strategic Value," I was surprised to see that more than half of the 190 organizations surveyed had between 6 and 15 separate content repositories at their companies. Another 17% had 16 repositories or more!

The sheer number of places where companies keep their critical information is truly astounding and I believe it is one of the biggest overarching problems in the realm of managing business information today. At the same Gartner Summit referenced above, research indicated that redundant and outdated information constitutes 50-90% of what we manage. So let me rephrase: We're swimming in a sea of old, redundant and often useless information.

You might think this problem could only exist within large companies like the Fortune 1000. Their size, employee base and regional footprint exacerbate the challenge of managing the vast amounts of the company's intellectual property.