Dive Brief:

• Experts say renewed interest in cybersecurity and growing compliance regulations may drive the comeback of Digital Rights Management (DRM).

• DRM vendors are reporting significant growth.

• The biggest users of the technology are the financial services industry, the government sector and healthcare.

Dive Insight:

According to a recent report from Frost & Sullivan, DRM was historically difficult to use and expensive to deploy and customize, pushing most companies to rely instead on technologies like Box and DropBox. But advances in usability and pricing models may be giving enterprise DRM a new opportunity to thrive.

"I am seeing upticks in growth in this category, mostly driven by the need for employees to easily share sensitive information," said David Monahan, research director at Enterprise Management Associates. "Files are always distributed outside the range of corporate security, typically up and down the supply chain. So this trend extends file security beyond the walls of the enterprise."

According to Frost & Sullivan, IBM, Microsoft, Citrix and Box have or are currently working on enterprise-level security for their file sharing platforms, while dedicated vendors such as Vaultize, WatchDox, Accellion, Fasoo, Syncplicity, Seclore and Egnyte also supply DRM services.