“Protecting our documents with Vitrium has been an easy and regular part of our process when sharing documents with clients. We are confident that our reports are not being shared without our approval.”
- Jon Schwartz, Senior Manager of Operations and Ratings
Based out of Philadelphia, PA, Aeris® guides capital to good. They are the information service for the nation’s leading community investors. Since 2004, Aeris® has provided ratings, data, and consulting that support investment in underserved places and people. The company provides performance data, analysis, and ratings of both financial risk and impact management. Aeris helps investors to screen, underwrite, and monitor investments that meet their risk parameters and social/environmental impact goals.
Investors rely on Aeris® Rating Reports for crucial information when making investment decisions. The company’s analysis is sold and distributed to different audiences as individual files, as content bundles, or through subscriptions. “Our business model is to sell subscriptions to our Rating Reports to investors while providing access to our analysis to the rated organization,” explains Jon Schwartz, Senior Manager of Operations and Ratings at Aeris®. “We also needed to ensure that investors purchasing reports and rated organizations were not redistributing our analysis.”
Prior to investing in an Enterprise Content Security and Digital Rights Management software solution, the company relied on basic out-of-the-box security measures available in PDF Readers, as well as resorting to distributing paper copies of the reports. Everything changed once they became aware of Vitrium Security and deployed the solution to block the sharing of content to those without a subscription to services provided by Aeris®.
The Solution – Vitrium Security
After identifying the need for an Enterprise Content Security and DRM software, Mr. Schwartz, along with Aeris® President and CEO, Paige Chapel, set out to find a solution that would prevent unauthorized sharing and distribution of their analysis reports. An industry colleague recommended Vitrium Security as a software solution worthy of investment to ensure revenue generating content was only accessible to clients subscribing to services provided by Aeris®. “We needed to find a document DRM solution that was easy to use and cost effective,” summarizes Mr. Schwartz, “and in Vitrium Security, we found a solution that had all the ideal DRM features to limit the loss of our subscription sales and thus, preserve our core revenue streams.”
By implementing Vitrium Security, Aeris® was able to ultimately control access to the content in their Ratings Reports as well as to deploy measures that prevent unauthorized sharing of documents. The company expanded distribution formats from PDFs to Secure PDFs and Secure Web Links, using Vitrium’s 256-bit AES military-grade encryption for additional content security when distributing Secure Web Links of their revenue-generating Ratings Reports.
Aeris® implemented Vitrium Security as part of their report distribution in the summer of 2014. Since then, under the supervision of Mr. Schwartz, Rating Reports in the format of PDFs are uploaded into Vitrium’s dashboard where layers of security and Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls are applied to the files. Reports are distributed via email to paying clients as Secure PDFs and Secure Web Links, and accessible with any device. “Protecting our documents with Vitrium has been an easy and regular part of our process when sharing documents with clients,” states Mr. Schwartz.
Vitrium Security has delivered an easy-to-use and robust set of content security tools for Aeris®, fulfilling on the promise of preventing content from being shared to unauthorized users. The result was ongoing peace of mind, as Mr. Schwartz concludes: “We are confident that our reports are not being shared without our approval.”