The average company’s data footprint keeps growing exponentially. Imagine this: people create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data and send 333.2 billion emails every single day.1 And with more than 300 million people working remotely all over the world, data security incidents can happen anytime, and anywhere.
Do you know what kinds of sensitive data you have and where it lives? How are you currently securing sensitive data across all your environments and preventing its loss? And how do you manage insider risks? These are all questions today’s businesses need to be asking themselves.
The fact is: data security is challenging for every business. Today’s organisations are struggling with a fragmented solution landscape. More than 80% of decision makers purchased multiple products to meet compliance and data security needs.2 However, this approach can be costly, hard to manage —and still leave gaps. A holistic approach to data security is essential.
Protecting sensitive data
The very first step to securing data is to understand and discover where it lives in your organisation. Therefore, you need a solution that gives you visibility across your entire data estate—whether that’s on-premises, in the cloud, hybrid, or multi-cloud.
With Microsoft Purview Information Protection, you can view and manage all your data from a single location, including the volume, type, and location of sensitive information. From here, you can easily classify and label your data and apply controls such as encryption, access control and more.
Microsoft Purview Information Protection also helps safeguard data throughout its lifecycle, with persistent labelling and encryption built into productivity tools. And that’s not all; because organisations need to protect data wherever people work, the visibility and protection of sensitive information are extended across your entire data estate, whether on-premises, hybrid, or cloud.
Preventing data loss
People’s work is everywhere. That’s why it’s imperative to secure information beyond the document level by ensuring all your outlet channels prevent exfiltration and unauthorised use. But it’s also important not to lock down data too much, because productivity plummets when users can’t access the data they need.
This comprehensive solution works across the different applications, services, and devices where sensitive data is stored, used, or shared. Whether it’s Microsoft-native platforms or non-Microsoft services and apps. Because Microsoft Purview DLP is cloud-native, you don’t need to install costly on-premises infrastructure or agents. Additionally, it can help you save costs, because you can consolidate the disparate solutions you might have today.
Managing insider risk
Data doesn’t move itself. People move data. In other words, data breaches are commonly caused by internal actors. Whether it’s departing employees exfiltrating data, malicious data theft or inadvertent overexposure.
The key is understanding how and why people are accessing data. When you understand the context, you can identify the potential data security risks and risky user activities that can lead to incidents. Organisations need a holistic approach to managing insider risk by bringing together the right people, processes, training, and tools.
Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management correlates various signals to identify potential malicious or inadvertent insider risks. These risks include IP theft, data leakage, and security violations. Insider Risk Management also enables customers to create policies that manage security and compliance. Built with privacy-by-design principles, users are anonymised by default, and role-based access controls and audit logs are in place to help ensure user-level privacy.
Fortifying your data security with an integrative approach
Microsoft Purview strengthens data security by offering information protection, insider risk management, and data loss prevention in a single unified platform. These three different layers of protection don’t just help secure data from potential data security incidents, they also work together as a single platform to strengthen your overall data security posture.
If you use Information Protection and Data Loss Prevention together, you can discover and auto-classify data to prevent unauthorised use.
Similarly, using Information Protection and Insider Risk Management together helps you understand the user’s intent around sensitive data to identify the most critical data risks in your organisation.
If you use Insider Risk Management and Data Loss Prevention, you can enable “Adaptive Protection,” which assigns appropriate Data Loss Prevention policies based on users’ risk levels. With Adaptive Protection, you can understand the context in which users are accessing information and how they’re interacting with it. Then you can calculate and assign appropriate risk levels, and automatically tailor the appropriate Data Loss Prevention controls based on a user’s risk levels.
And when you put them all together, Microsoft Purview helps you strengthen your overall data security posture.
In today’s modern workplace, data security risk is dynamic. The type of content changes, just as the people who interact with that data shifts. What people do with data changes too. That means data security is even more complicated to manage. Unfortunately, broad, static policies no longer work. At one extreme, they run the risk of not doing anything and on the other, they can overprotect data to the point that people can’t get anything done at all. Far too often, admins scramble to manually adjust policy scopes and triage alerts to identify critical risks.
Adaptive Prevention helps solve this issue by helping you address the most critical risks dynamically. With Adaptive Prevention, Machine Learning analysis continuously detects and mitigates the most critical risks for both content and users. It helps you gain a better understanding of risk by using Insider Risk Management to classify data and users, understand user context, and gain insights into how that data is going to be used.
Then, Adaptive Protection automatically adjusts the right level of mitigation controls based on the risks detected. For instance, high-risk users can be scoped in a stricter control while low-risk users can work as usual. And it’s constantly adjusting. The controls can be dialled up and down when users’ risk levels change.
As a result, Adaptive Protection not only helps reduce the security team’s workload, but also makes Data Loss Prevention more effective by continuously optimising policies.
How we can help
As a Microsoft Solutions partner and a member of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA), mobco has the expertise in privacy and data protection required to help you govern and safeguard your data as well as improve your compliance posture. If you want to learn more about what we can do to help? Contact us today via the form below.
Sources
Tech Jury, How Much Data Is Created Every Day in 2023?, February 2023
IBM, “Cost of a Data Breach Report,“ 2022
Proofpoint, “Insider Threats Are (Still) on the Rise: 2022 Ponemon Report,” January 25,2022.