Safeguard PDF Security advantages vs competitors
Cost / ROI
All other solutions we have come across have significant implementation costs. You have to use and maintain your own server that hosts a licensing system, and configure it in-house or pay top dollar consultancy costs. In addition, some competitors start their pricing at $25,000 or limit you to the number of customers you can manage or the number of documents you can protect. Other less pricey systems force you to upload unprotected documents to their servers and use insecure methods to protect documents. And most PDF DRM companies force you to pay for their system for a minimum of 1 year.
We host the licensing / administration system on our own servers so there are no extra implementation or consultancy costs. Or you can host it on your own servers. We let you protect as many documents as you like and manage as many customers as you like without any additional charge and the minimum tie-in is just 1 month. So you know your costs are fixed instead of us charging for your success.
Zero installation Viewers
Our Secure USB Viewer provides exactly the same DRM security as our desktop viewer but does not have to be installed by the user. Users don’t have to connect to a licensing server to register or verify access, or even have an Internet connection available. It therefore avoids issues with firewalls and situations where Windows admin rights or Internet access are not allowed. Our Secure USB Viewer enables users to use protected PDF documents instantly on any computer wherever they are.
Our Web Viewer can be accessed via a browser on any Operating System. Whilst less secure than our installed Viewers it gives users extra flexibility for accessing files on the move.
Much quicker to get up and running
Since we host the licensing system, you can get up and running in a matter of minutes. Some of our competitors quote that you can be up and running in a number of days!
Simpler to use, easier to manage
There are no passwords or certificates to worry about, manage or send to your customers. Decryption keys are transparently relayed to your user’s computers in a secure manner and stored in an encrypted keystore.
Protecting PDF files is easy – just right-click on them in Windows Explorer and select the appropriate PDF document protection rights. There are no complex document identifiers, encoding schemes or confusing policy choices.
We also provide the unique concept of publications, enabling you to group documents into publications for simpler document management and customer subscription services.
Whilst we use public key technology, no key management is required by you as the publisher or by your users or customers, as it is all handled transparently by the licensing system. There are no certificates to revoke when you want to terminate user access or any other PKI complexity. To sum up, our system is simple to administer compared to competitor offerings.
See what our customers have to say about us – DRM Security Testimonials.
Simple assigning of document access rights
Many of our competitors provide controls at the user level. This is fine if you are certain that all the PDF documents you ever send to a user require identical controls.
We provide controls at the document level. This means you can decide just how important the document is. This more closely matches the value of the information, rather than assuming that the user always has the same rights for every document you make available to them.
Of course, in our system, you can publish the same document more than once, applying different controls to each publication and expiry can be controlled at both the document and the user level.
Prevention of third party screen grabbers
At best, our competitors prevent the use of Windows print screen. Most users however have screen grabbing software installed on their computers that enables them to use any key combination or mouse click to grab screen shots of your protected PDF documents. Preventing just the use of Windows print screen is therefore practically useless. Safeguard PDF Security prevents screen grabbing software from taking screen shots of your protected PDF documents.
Security
We don’t use insecure passwords, low strength encryption (128 bit) or plug-ins that are vulnerable to attack so you can be sure your PDF documents are protected using the best security available.
We don’t use JavaScript since this can seriously compromize your customers computers (JavaScript is the No. 1 malware attack for PDF files – see PDF security issues).
We don’t leave your documents in the Windows swap file in the clear so they can be easily copied by others. Nor do we create extra files on disk that can be copied to another computer along with the protected PDF files so they can be easily shared.
We don’t make you upload your source files to a web server in order to protect them (where they could be easily compromized). With us unprotected and protected PDF files remain in your control and ownership at all times and are never exposed.
See also PDF DRM – 10 things they did not tell you.