How Microsoft DLP could help keep your data safe.
If you are a health practitioner, accountant, lawyer, marketer, or you deal with client’s sensitive information on a daily basis, its really important to have a very clear understanding of how, as a [location] business, you are going to keep your client’s information safe. With so many warnings that cybersecurity is on the rise, it’s really important for [location] business to have this part of their IT support sorted with confidence.
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 in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Centre, you can identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive information across Office 365. You will need Microsoft Premium to engage DLP, however, is it not worth the peace of mind? We think so! 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. 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. If one of your team attempts to share a document containing sensitive information, a DLP policy can both send them an email with a policy tip 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 processes in how to solve your data protection dilemma. Please know you are not alone in implementing this, however. We have a team of IT support experts ready and rearing to go. Just give us a call on 06 769 9907
Joseph is one of our blog contributors and a systems engineer.