Ensuring robust communication compliance is more crucial than ever. In today’s dynamic digital business landscape, defined by technology integration and the rise of hybrid work models, organizations must navigate a vast sea of data while adhering to stringent compliance mandates to avoid significant penalties, such as the eye-opening $1.8 billion in fines levied on top investment banks by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2022(1). These penalties were a result of employees violating communication requirements by using personal devices and company applications for business discussions.
Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance emerges as a strategic ally, a comprehensive solution armed with advanced AI capabilities. It swiftly identifies, captures, and addresses potential communication risks, offering seamless data security and compliance integration with everyday operations. This solution is not tethered to a single platform but seamlessly integrates with various communication channels, from Microsoft Teams to Microsoft Viva Engage, Microsoft Exchange email, and applications like Instant Bloomberg. It’s an adaptive response to the evolving digital landscape, where data security and compliance are paramount.
In this era of AI adoption, in which 93% of organizations are actively pursuing AI strategies (2), excitement is tempered by concerns. Chief among these worries is the lack of controls, with 37% of organizations expressing concerns about the potential leakage of intellectual property data through generative AI(2). Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance bridges these concerns, offering seamless integration with communication platforms while ensuring robust safeguards for user privacy. It transforms these concerns into opportunities by unifying AI’s potential with the imperatives of communication compliance. In a world where data security and compliance are non-negotiable, Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance provides an innovative and reliable solution, guiding organizations toward a future where communication is both secure and efficient, without compromising individual privacy.
As part of this evolution, we’re thrilled to introduce five groundbreaking features at Microsoft Ignite 2023:
Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 Support
We are pleased to announce the integration of Copilot for Microsoft 365, which introduces an advanced level of detection within Communication Compliance. This groundbreaking feature empowers organizations to identify risky communication not just in ordinary channels but also within prompted and response content within Copilot for Microsoft 365. As the digital landscape evolves, it’s crucial to maintain control and oversight over your communication platforms. In an illustrative scenario, an investigator, equipped with designated permissions, can meticulously examine Copilot interactions across various Microsoft applications, including Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Teams, OneNote, and Whiteboard. the Communication Compliance investigator can see that Adele used Copilot to enquire about the top-secret project - ‘Project Dragon’ for personal financial gain, which violates her organization’s policy, showcasing the precision and effectiveness of this feature. This includes the ability to identify specific patterns in both prompts and responses, such as keywords, sensitive information types like social security and credit card numbers, and matches in trainable classifiers, further enhancing security and compliance efforts. With the ability to select Copilot chats as a checked location in the policy creation wizard, customer administrators now have a powerful tool to ensure that potentially inappropriate or confidential data risks are effectively mitigated.
In addition to this capability, we’ve introduced an additional template exclusively for creating policies dedicated to checking all Copilot for Microsoft 365 chats. This empowers administrators to fine-tune their management strategy precisely to their organization’s needs, with a focus on user privacy protection. Whether it's setting specific conditions or deploying trainable classifiers, this feature provides flexibility and adaptability in compliance management, ensuring your organization's communications remain secure, compliant, and respectful of user privacy.
Figure 1: Microsoft 365 Copilot prompt and response detection using Communication Compliance
Communication Compliance Documents and Alert summaries with Security Copilot
Communication Compliance is constantly enhancing data security and regulatory adherence through its seamless integration with Security Copilot intelligence, resulting in a powerful combination that empowers organizations to thrive in the digital age while safeguarding their data and reputation. This embedded Copilot experience offers a substantial enhancement to your ability to swiftly evaluate conversations and pinpoint keywords or classifiers that trigger policy matches, streamlining the investigation process and providing concise contextual summaries.
For example, when a policy violation is detected, Security Copilot can swiftly generate a contextual summary of the conversation, highlighting specific segments that led to the potential violation. It evaluates these conversations against predefined policies, which could include scenarios like sensitive financial information sharing or inappropriate content.
Security Copilot in Communication Compliance helps customers quickly summarize alerts and pinpoint keywords or classifiers that triggered policy matches, turning the arduous task of sifting through an entire meeting transcript, email attachments, Teams attachments, or long text into a concise summary where high-risk communications are highlighted for immediate attention, all while maintaining strict adherence to user privacy. With this summary at your disposal, you can now take swift and adequate remediation actions, ensuring a proactive response to potential communication risks.
You can harness the power of generative AI by using either pre-built prompts or creating open text prompts to gain a deeper understanding of alerts and make informed decisions on how to proceed. This versatile approach enhances your ability to manage high-risk communications effectively and enables you to significantly expedite your investigation processes and streamline compliance management, ensuring that your organization remains secure and compliant across communication platforms. It's about achieving results faster, making compliance an efficient and effective part of your organization's operations.
Figure 2: accelerate alert triage with contextual summarization
Next Generation Business Conduct Detection using AI
Communication Compliance now leverages advanced Azure content safety AI technology to create safer online environments. It can effectively identify and categorize content as hateful, violent, sexual, or related to self-harm, while also assigning severity scores. This feature empowers businesses to prioritize which content requires immediate attention from their moderation teams. Unlike many existing solutions, Communication Compliance integration with Azure’s content safety excels at grasping nuances and context, significantly reducing the workload on human content moderators.
What sets it apart is its flexibility. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution; instead, it can be tailored to align with a business's specific content policies and guidelines. Furthermore, its multi-lingual models enable it to comprehend and assess content in numerous languages simultaneously, making it a versatile and powerful tool for businesses operating in diverse linguistic environments.
Reporting for inappropriate content within Viva Engage
Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance deploys built-in machine learning classifiers and keywords to identify and address inappropriate conduct and enforce regulatory compliance within Viva Engage. As part of our multi-layered compliance defense, we're thrilled to extend the support for inappropriate or concerning conversations reported by users in Viva Engage, for streamlined management of reported concerns.
Designated investigators, equipped with the appropriate role-based access control permissions, can review reported conversations, and act accordingly. During the review process, they have the power to perform standard remediation actions. This collaborative approach fosters a sense of community-driven commitment, helps drive respectful conversations, and boosts a productive communication environment for our customers within Viva Engage. This follows the new and enhanced security, auditing, and moderation capabilities in Viva Engage for regulated workplaces, as outlined in a recent blog.
Keep Microsoft Teams Meetings Compliant with Communication Compliance
Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance now extends its capabilities to Microsoft Teams meetings, providing organizations with the tools to detect regulatory and business conduct compliance violations in live meeting transcripts. These features include live transcription support for video, a powerful video snippet feature for comprehensive context, and integration with Advanced eDiscovery for enhanced data review and compliance management. By keeping Microsoft Teams meetings compliant, organizations can ensure secure, productive, and accountable collaboration while safeguarding against business risks.
Stay ahead of compliance challenges and embark on a journey toward more secure and accountable communication with Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance. Unleash the power of these innovative features to ensure your organization remains safe, compliant, and future-ready in the digital age. Microsoft Ignite 2023 marks the beginning of this exciting journey, and we invite you to join us on this transformative path.
To learn more about our announcements above, watch our Ignite session Accelerate risk assessment and incident investigation with AI.
[1] Matthew Goldstein and Emily Flitter, “Texting on Private Apps Costs Wall Street Firms $1.8 Billion in Fines,” The New York Times, September 7, 2022.
[2] aka.ms/researchandinsights
Microsoft