Digital Protection Goes Hollywood

Dec 1, 2006 12:00 PM

Things like iPods, DVD burners, USB drives and other removable storage devices have raised data security concerns in many organizations, but nowhere more than among Hollywood's major movie studios and their partners, where digital pirates can steal movies and other copyrighted material.

One of the more well-known and established movie studio partners is Technicolor Creative Services DVD (TCS DVD), based in Burbank, Calif. Technicolor is a full-service DVD compression and authoring facility that services the major motion picture studios for feature release movies and episodic television shows.

Since each movie or television show comes in a myriad of versions and requires distribution on a worldwide scale, the company processes thousands of discs annually. Such an immense volume of high-profile data passing from the studios to and through Technicolor poses a number of security challenges.

“A few years ago, I got together with my senior engineer and we said ‘What are the ways that people can just walk out of here with a movie?’” says Ken Spickler, director of engineering for TCS DVD. “We realized that they could burn it to a DVD-R, or if they had an MPEG-4 codec or some similar program they could compress it and burn it to a CD-R.”

Technicolor turned to Senforce Technologies, a Utah-based provider of endpoint security management and enforcement. Senforce installed its Endpoint Security Suite (ESS), which includes removable storage device security, throughout the Technicolor facility. ESS helps TCS-DVD's 220 employees by assigning policies to desktop and laptop port access by approved devices only.

Technicolor security administrators can choose to give employees complete freedom over the attachment of external devices via USB, FireWire, Bluetooth, Infrared and PCMCIA ports, or limit them to only having data transfer capability within the safe office environment.

“With the addition of data security to Senforce's suite, we can now monitor and control who copies what data to or from which device,” says Spickler. “Policies can even be applied using the serial numbers of approved storage devices. Couple that with Senforce Location-Aware technology, and we can centrally control all endpoint security policies and ensure that the appropriate policy is applied according to the location that a user is working from.”

Want to use this article? Click here for options!
© 2012 Penton Media Inc.

This month in Access Control

• Targeting The Customer
• Electronic Pedigrees
• One Hero Among Many
• Who? What? When? Where? Why?
• More from September's issue