The Data Protection Solution

The Data Protection Solution; How Microsoft DLP (Data Loss Protection) could help keep your data safe. If you are a health practitioner, accountant, lawyer. Marketer, or you deal with sensitive client information daily, it is particularly important that you have a clear understanding of how you are going to keep your client’s information safe. With so many warnings that cybercrime is on the rise, and the implications of recent changes to the privacy act, especially regarding data breaches, it is vital that businesses have this part of their IT support sorted with confidence.

What do I need to Comply?

To comply with business standards and industry regulations, organisations 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 peace of mind? We think so! Let us take a closer look at the key features and functions.

Identify Sensitive Information

Microsoft DLP can search across many locations, such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. It can also monitor and protect desktop programs like Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. You can identify any document containing a national health number that is 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 did not 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 do not have protocols in place to prevent accidental sharing of sensitive information. With DLP it is 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 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 or contact us here.

This article was kindly written by our ITA associate Rick Clement from Black SANZ IT, New Plymouth

IT Alliance Members:
CT Business Solutions - Hamilton
@Computer - Northland
Technology Partners - Tauranga
Vision Lab - Te Puke
AdvancedIT - Rotorua
BlackSANZ - New Plymouth
GTB - Kapiti, Wellington
Decision1 IT Solutions - Dunedin
IT Centre - Wanaka
Voicecom - Invercargill
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