Document Security is the foundation of a document management system. Enterprises must secure many of the documents they process for reasons that include protecting a customer's privacy in accordance with the law, and gaining an advantage over competitors by not sharing trade secrets. 

The threat model is that a company's stakeholders (employees, consultants, shareholders etc.) who access sensitive documents are not trusted, because:

• they may be careless in their use and distribution of data
• their software might be untrustworthy (eg. compromised by a Trojan horse) even when the users are trustworthy or
• some may actually be dishonest.

This lack of trust means strong client-side control is required, which propels Document Security into the realm of rights management and trusted computing.

Document Management Systems (DMS) provide good governance and auditing with respect to trust worthiness: only those granted access to specific documents may do so. Even those with privileges will have an audit trail available to management. Document Management Systems prevent users from deleting documents or even having access to e-mailing them. Most DMS  solutions provide a deep security mechanism against the documents, such as the ability to print, e-mail, fax and distribute all the while tracking these actions.