Microsoft Data Loss Prevention

How Microsoft DLP could help keep your data safe.

Its really important you have a very clear understanding of how you are going to keep your client’s information safe. Especially if you are a health practitioner, accountant, lawyer, marketer, or you deal with client’s sensitive information on a daily basis. With so many warnings that cyber security is on the rise, it’s really important for Wellington regional businesses to have this part of their IT support sorted with confidence. Microsoft Data Loss Prevention (DLP) can help with that.

What do I need to Comply?

To comply with business standards and industry regulations, organizations must protect, process, track and discard sensitive information and prevent its inadvertent disclosure. Sensitive information can include financial data or personally identifiable information such as credit card numbers or health records. If you are a health practitioner, you might want to check out our recent article on what this means for you.

With a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy set up in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Centre, you can identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive information across Office 365. It can help you to NOT email material you didn't mean to. You will need a Microsoft 365 Enterpise product, which costs a bit more, but you need to ask youself - is it not worth the peace of mind? Let’s take a closer look at the key features and functions.

Identify Sensitive Information

DLP can search across many locations, such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. It can also monitor and protect across desktop programs like Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. For example, you can identify any document containing a national health number that's stored in any OneDrive for Business site. Or, you can monitor just the OneDrive sites of specific people. Helpful if you are in the health profession, no doubt.

Whoops, I didn’t mean to send that!

Yikes, this one is a doozey. We have all pushed the go button and only moments later regretted it. SO, easy to do if you don’t have protocols in place to prevent accidental sharing of sensitive information. With DLP it’s easy to block access to a document or, block the email from being sent in the first place!

Compliance without Extra Work

There is nothing worse than productivity being held up by red tape. DLP helps users learn how to stay compliant without interrupting their workflow. For example, if one of your team attempts to share a document containing sensitive information, a DLP policy can send them an email with a policy tip, and with the option to override the policy if they have a business justification.

Useful Alerts and Reposts

Everybody loves being able to see reports and alerts quickly. You can use the DLP Alerts Management Dashboard to monitor how your organization is complying with your policy. Easy yet effective!

Hopefully these key areas have opened up a few thought process in how to solve your data protection dilemma. Please know you are not along in implementing this however. We have a team of IT support experts ready and rearing to go. Just give us a call or email us here.