Protecting an organization’s data has always been a priority since the beginning of the use of the computer, but as time has progressed, ensuring the security of your information has become more difficult. This sensitive information is crucial for your business and it includes financial, customer, proprietary data, and possibly even health records or social security numbers. Since the creation of large portable storage devices (USB drives), high-speed Internet connections, and cloud-based storage, your data has a higher risk of being stolen by an employee or contractor.
In the last year, we’ve seen a massive amount of employees quitting their jobs and this phenomenon has been named the Great Resignation. There are many reasons why people are leaving, but regardless of why they are departing, many of these employees will try to take company data with them. Their reason for stealing data may not be as malicious as looking to sell the data to a competitor or start their own business, and it could be that they just want the data to be used at their next job as templates or something else non-malicious. Regardless… it is YOUR data which means you want to prevent them from taking the information and if they do make a copy of it, it is well documented and the appropriate people are alerted.
The practice to prevent users from copying or sharing it externally is called data loss prevention (DLP). There are several DLP solutions out there and they all do an amazing job, but what most people don’t know is that Microsoft has one of the most advanced DLP solutions, and what is more amazing is that it is included for FREE with most Microsoft O365 subscriptions.
With Microsoft’s DLP policies, you can identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive data from the following systems:
- Microsoft cloud-based systems such as Teams, Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive
- Office applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
- Windows 10 computers and laptops
- On-premise file shares, so non-cloud shares
Please let us know if DLP is something your organization would benefit from and we can provide you with additional information!