Microsoft Ignite 2019 – Update – Compliance and security

Tuesday November 5th update

This day is mostly focused on information protection. Which is also part of a compliance strategy. In order to be compliant, we will need to:

• Know our data
• Protect our data
• Monitor our data

Knowing our data

Part of this subject is to discover your data and to be able to classify it. Till now, we had platforms like Microsoft Cloud App Security and the (AIP) Scanner. Also, we had the sensitive information types.

These are still here. But there’s some great enhancements.

The content explorer now shows you the data which matches the sensitive information types and where this data is stored. You can easily get an overview of these locations. The activity explorer also shows you information on the data in your organisation.

 

Trainable classifiers

This is very, very cool. Using machine teaching, you can now train Microsoft Information Protection to create a classification based on the content already in your platform. One of the ways to achieve this, is to point the trainable classifier to a data location. During a test phase you will train the platform to differentiate between false-positives and positives. By the way – you already get six out of the box classifiers (for example, Profanity and Source code).

You can use this classifier to automatically apply a retention and sensitivity label. Very cool stuff!

Protecting our data

And here is it! Office Online now has a native integration with sensitivity labels.

Yeah! This is a very welcome (and highly anticipated) feature which, in my opinion, will add to the success of information protection. A lot of organisations I know were disappointed by the apparent lack of integration in Microsoft 365. But that’s in the past 🙂

This feature even works with co-authoring! One drawback: only from the web….

Some other announcements for this day:

• Apply labels to a container  (Office 365 Group, Teams, SharePoint site, PowerBI workspace);
• For PowerBI the protection extents to downloading information to Excel – the Excel file will have the label applied 🙂
• Use DLP actions based on a sensitivity label – this was (for now) only available for retention labels;
• All locations (including Office 365, cloud apps and on-premises locations) can now be added during the configuration of the label – very cool!

• The information protection add-in is now included in all Office apps, across all platforms;
• CAD files can now be protected by information protection;
• A new feature in Office shows you why an automatic label was presented, by showing the sensitive information in the document. This really, really helps the awareness for the employee!

If needed, I’ll update this post regularly.

More info:

• https://aka.ms/protectyourdata-Ignite2019
• https://aka.ms/securitypreviews