These Two Microsoft Security Features Can Greatly Improve Data Security & Compliance

In today’s digital world, file security has changed dramatically. In the “olden days,” you could lock files away in a filing cabinet locked in a separate room with a passcode. But now files are electronic and easily sharable online, requiring completely different security strategies.

The ease of online communication has also led to more challenges when it comes to compliance with data privacy or financial regulations. Those in the financial industry, especially, can find it harder to keep specific departments from interacting in a world of instant chat and screensharing. 

Have you been trying to come up with modern office IT solutions for document security and compliance?

If you’re using Office 365, then you may already have the solution.

There are two key features in the platform, one that’s been available for a while and one currently rolling out now, that address both these areas of company security to streamline office procedures and make safeguards more automated.

Using Microsoft Sensitivity Labels

The first feature we’ll discuss is Sensitivity Labels, which is widely available in Office 365 and continues to get updated to add more capabilities.  

There are major differences in how you want to have your staff handle security for a sales brochure as opposed to a spreadsheet containing trade secrets. But if your system can’t tell the difference as far as security goes, how can you ensure they aren’t both handled by your staff in the same way?

That’s the purpose of Sensitivity Labels. These are labels that you can add to Office documents and emails that then come with document handling guidelines that your administrator has put into place.

For example, you might have a sensitivity label of “Public” on your sales brochure that allows it to be emailed, shared from OneDrive and basically has no restrictions on use. 

For the spreadsheet containing trade secrets, you can set a sensitivity label of “Confidential” that could stop the Excel document from being copied, shared online, or emailed, and add a watermark to the document stating handling procedures.

You can set the label classification types that you want and the automatic handling parameters that go along with them. Then whenever an employee creates a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document or an email, they can manually apply the Sensitivity Label, or it can be applied automatically by the system based upon document/email content. 

With Sensitivity Labels, you can:

·      Encrypt and watermark content

·      Protect content across different platforms and devices

·      Prevent copying, attaching, and otherwise prevent sensitive content from being leaked

·      Protect content even if it’s in a 3rd party app, like Salesforce or Dropbox.

·      Generate document usage reports

·      Prevent content from being deleted

Administrative features allow admins to require that users add a Sensitivity Label to a document or email when they create it. Default labels can also be added to all content and admins can require a justification before a label is changed. 

An upcoming feature rolling out in 2020 is automatic Sensitivity Labels being applied to documents stored in SharePoint and OneDrive based upon scanned document content.

Information Barriers for Compliance Help

Microsoft created Information Barriers as a way to help companies that need to silo communications due to particular compliance needs.

It was first created as an answer to financial companies that need to comply with certain FINRA regulations, such as this one that restricts communications within a company to prevent conflict of interest.

But, it’s a helpful tool for anyone that needs to restrict communication between departments. Such as only allowing your R&D department to instant message with your product development department, but not sales department.

Information Barriers currently impacts communications in Microsoft Teams, and an expansion to SharePoint sites is currently in private preview.

To access Information Barriers, you need to have one of the following: 

·      Microsoft 365 E5

·      Office 365 E5

·      Office 365 Advanced Compliance

·      Microsoft 365 E5 Information Protection and Compliance 

What Information Barriers does is allow you to restrict several types of communications within your Teams application. It can be done per individual or per group.

The goal is to reduce conflicts of interest in certain organizations and to help prevent data leakage (where sensitive data is shared accidentally).

The types of restrictions you can put into place in the Microsoft Teams app using Information Barriers are:

·      Ability to search for a certain user

·      Ability to add a member to a team

·      Starting a chat session with someone

·      Screensharing during an online meeting

·      Inviting someone to join a meeting or group chat

·      Placing a call to someone through Teams

An extremely helpful benefit of Information Barriers is that it can be used with Guest Users as well. So, if you have a vendor temporarily communicating with a certain department using your Teams platform, you could restrict them to only have the ability to interact with that specific team in your organization.

Looking for Customized Compliance & Data Security Solutions? 

Office 365 has several customizations that can reduce administrative time while improving your organization’s security. BrainStomp can help you take full advantage of them!

Schedule a free consultation today! Call 260-918-3548 or reach out online.