Data protection

Once you have defined the labels you want to use to apply to content in your organization and configured the classifiers that you want to use to identify data, you can use policies to protect content. For example, you might create a policy to automatically detect credit card numbers based on the credit card number sensitive information type, apply a label identifying it as personal information, and then apply encryption to prevent the content from being opened by unauthorized parties.

Policies are used to do the following:

• Publish labels to application interfaces, making them available for users to apply manually

• Automatically apply labels to content-matching classifiers

• Apply information protection features to content-matching classifiers

Data loss prevention (DLP ) is a form of data protection and information governance that covers several related areas, such as protecting sensitive data at rest (using sensitivity labels with encryption, for example) as well as data in transit (encrypting content that matches sensitive information types in an email and applying encryption or detecting sensitive information in Teams chats).

DLP policies can be used to notify users that they are sharing potentially sensitive content through a mechanism called policy tips. These tips (or notifications) are displayed to users in Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook or when sharing content through the SharePoint and OneDrive interfaces. Depending on the settings and scope of the policy, you may choose to allow users to continue with their actions (called an override) by providing a business justification, or you can block the transmission of the data altogether.

Microsoft 365 provides DLP for content in the Microsoft 365 service. DLP can also be used to protect content created and managed on endpoints using Microsoft Endpoint DLP.

Whenever matching content is detected through DLP policies, alerts are displayed in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal as well as being managed as incidents in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal.