Microsoft has witnessed the evolving needs of businesses and employees worldwide in the face of geopolitical and economic challenges. The nature of the workplace has changed, particularly with the emergence of remote and hybrid work environments. These new work arrangements have raised new productivity, communication, and data security challenges. In response, Microsoft has been developing flexible solutions that enable optimal collaboration while upholding data protection. Protecting data from risks poses a significant challenge, but Microsoft remains at the forefront of innovation in data protection and privacy solutions for enterprise organizations. As a result of their efforts, two highly integrated and robust solutions have been introduced: Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Priva. Both tools are designed to address the challenges associated with data protection and privacy.

Microsoft Purview

In today's dynamic business landscape, organizations face many evolving challenges. These challenges encompass various aspects, such as enhancing productivity, empowering employees, and mitigating exposure gaps within their infrastructure. Additionally, organizations must ensure data protection in the context of a hybrid work environment. Microsoft Purview offers a streamlined approach to data protection, acknowledging that an organization's data is its most valuable asset. Data catalyzes valuable insights, enabling effective business operations, gaining a competitive edge in the market, and facilitating collaborative and productive work environments for employees. Implementing robust measures to protect the data at every stage is crucial, ensuring that they don't get compromised.

To ensure comprehensive data protection, creating a defense-in-depth strategy that includes multiple layers of security measures is imperative.

The initial layer of defense involves gaining an understanding of the sensitive data present within your organization. It is crucial to have comprehensive knowledge of the data's locations, types, access permissions, sharing mechanisms, storage methods, and even its movement across different systems. Microsoft Purview Information Protection helps by facilitating the classification and labeling of your data, providing protection at the forefront. Considering the exponential growth of data volumes each year, it is essential to adopt solutions that offer unparalleled visibility into your entire data landscape, whether it resides on-premises or in a multi-cloud environment. Microsoft Purview simplifies this task by offering a centralized platform where you can view and manage your data from a single interface.

The next layer of defense in data protection strategy is to manage data security risks within your organization. Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management identifies potential risks and empowers security teams to respond faster. Comprehensive risk management can be achieved by combining the capabilities of Insider Risk Management with a holistic approach that incorporates the right individuals, well-defined processes, appropriate training, and reliable tools. As a valuable resource, Microsoft has recently released the 'Building a Holistic Insider Risk Management Program' report, offering organizations guidance in developing a robust insider risk strategy.

The third layer of defense includes an integrated and comprehensive approach to prevent data loss and unauthorized data usage. Alarmingly, over 85% of organizations lack the confidence to detect and prevent the loss of sensitive data. To address this concern, Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention plays a key role by balancing data protection and productivity. It ensures that appropriate access controls are in place and establishes policies to prevent actions such as improper saving, storage, or printing of sensitive data.

By incorporating the three key components of Information Protection, Insider Risk Management, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP), organizations can establish an integrated and holistic data protection strategy, thereby protecting their valuable data. Microsoft Purview's mission is to protect the entire data estate, including non-Microsoft environments, while enabling secure productivity across third-party applications, services, and platforms.

Use cases

Research shows the importance of the PDF file format for organizations, as it consistently ranks among the most prevalent file types stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive. Many PDF files contain sensitive information. Microsoft has integrated its data protection capabilities to fully support the PDF format across various products, services, and platforms. For instance, a recent enhancement involves the integration of Microsoft Purview Information Protection directly within Adobe Acrobat. This integration enables the application of classification, labeling, and protection features, bringing the same level of functionality available for Office file formats to PDF files.

Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management

Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management is a powerful solution designed to assist organizations in detecting and mitigating insider risks, such as data theft by departing employees or unauthorized disclosure of confidential information. When considering data protection and risk management, it is crucial to understand the patterns and potential risks within your organization. This includes recognizing what constitutes normal activities and identifying activities that may pose potential risks. By understanding your data landscape, you can adopt a targeted approach to addressing insider risks.

Within Insider Risk Management, you can gain insights into your organization's data landscape through an analytics report. This tool enables you to generate aggregated anonymous insights on potentially risky activities that could lead to data security incidents. This report can be generated with a simple click of a button, even before setting up your initial policy, and is delivered within 48 hours. The report provides valuable information, such as the percentage of users within the organization who have engaged in exfiltration activities.

If you click on the details, you can see an additional breakdown with insights by activity type. These insights not only help you understand potential insider risks in your data estate but also support in the development of customized policies to address your organization's specific needs.

You can click Get Started on the Analytics Insights page and easily set up an insider risk management policy. With just a few clicks, you can begin detecting potentially risky activities and generating alerts for your security team to review.

After the alerts are generated, they will show on the alerts page. It's important to note that all names in the alerts are pseudo-anonymized. By default, pseudo anonymization is turned on in insider risk management, meaning usernames are not visible. This privacy-first approach ensures that sensitive user information remains protected.

Clicking into an alert provides a summary of all the risk factors associated with it.

In the User activity tab, you will find that this user has a sequence detected. Sequences enable correlation across related activities involving the same files. This correlation helps security teams gain insights into the potential intent behind the activity, thereby reducing the response time to mitigate risks.

You can utilize sequences as triggers for your policies, enhancing the effectiveness of your alerts. You can better identify and prioritize potential risks by focusing policy detection on users who have executed these multi-stage sequences.

By leveraging the priority content-only scoring feature, you can focus your policy detection on activities related to the most sensitive content within your organization. For instance, you can create a policy that targets the detection of activities involving content related to a top-secret project. You can select the priority content-only scoring option when configuring your policy in the policy wizard.

Microsoft Priva

Data privacy and data protection are closely intertwined. As per Gartner, by the end of 2024, modern privacy regulations will cover the personal data of three-quarters of the global population. Recognizing the growing importance of data privacy regulations, Microsoft has introduced a new suite of privacy solutions called Microsoft Priva. With Microsoft Priva, you can proactively address critical and prevalent privacy risks, such as data hoarding, cross-border data transfers, and ensuring compliance with privacy rights. By leveraging Microsoft Priva, you can prevent privacy incidents and build customer trust.

The number of countries implementing modern GDPR-like regulations continues to grow. Rising consumer demand for greater data control has prompted a shift from a compliance-driven approach to a more human-centric perspective in privacy management. Recognizing this shift, Microsoft has undertaken human-centered privacy research with experts from the University of Washington, Colorado State University, and National Louis University. This research involved analyzing over 400,000 social media posts and conducting surveys with hundreds of consumers and professionals. The aim was to understand the triggers of privacy vulnerability and emphasize the significance of investing in a privacy-resilient workplace to establish trust.

Microsoft Priva provides two key products to build a privacy-resilient workplace: Privacy Risk Management and Subject Right Requests.

Privacy Risk Management

Privacy Risk Management assists organizations in identifying and mitigating privacy risks while empowering information workers to make smart data-handling decisions. For instance, consider an information worker saving personal data within Microsoft 365. Adhering to the data minimization principle mandated by modern privacy laws can be challenging, as it requires manually tracking the personal data stored and identifying data that no longer needs to be retained.

With Microsoft Priva, privacy admins can configure a data minimization policy. This policy automatically triggers an email notification to the data owner, who can review the files and delete those that no longer serve a purpose directly from the Outlook experience.

Subject Right Requests

The subject rights requests capability helps organizations efficiently manage and respond to requests at scale, instilling confidence in the process. Microsoft has recently introduced several common templates that assist admins in creating requests with recommended configurations, streamlining the subject rights request management process.