Microsoft's Partnership with EMC

Microsoft has announced a partnership with EMC to provide dynamic data classification for content, among other things. 

Currently, the typical process is that a knowledge worker adds sensitive information to a file and then manually applies security to that file. To illustrate, Steve creates an Excel spreadsheet that contains customer's social security numbers. He adds protection to the file so that only his coworkers in the accounting department can open the file, and only his manager can print the file.

The "new" scenario looks more like this: Steve creates a spreadsheet that contains social security numbers and the classification engine automatically recognizes the social security numbers and applies protection to the file.

"The first deliverable from the expanded partnership is a tight integration between RSA’s DLP Suite and Microsoft rights management technology. Scheduled to ship later this month, version 6.5 of RSA’s DLP Suite will include support for Microsoft Active Directory RMS, part of Windows Server 2008. The integration will allow customers to automatically apply RMS-based information access and usage policies, based on the sensitivity of information. In addition, the RSA solution’s integration with Active Directory will help enable customers to efficiently implement data loss prevention controls tied to employee identity or group membership."