Forum Discussion
Automatically applying labels to sites/site collections
The answer is yes. What you're looking for are classification labels (see https://www.petri.com/office-365-data-governance). You can apply these to a document library in three ways:
1. Make it the default that a label applies to all items in the library (and sub-folders).
2. Select each item and add the appropriate label.
3. Use an auto-label policy to find the documents you want to protect and apply a label. This requires E5 licenses.
I suspect that option 1 is what you need.
To Dean's point, a gap currently exists between Office 365 classification labels and those used by Azure Information Protection (AIP). I suspect, but don't know, that the gap will close and we might hear about this at Ignite.
There are 2 types of labels: Office 365 labels and Azure Information Protection labels. Which one do you want to apply? The long term purpose will help to determine the appropriate type.
You can automatically apply Azure IP labels to files that contain specific contents, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/information-protection/deploy-use/configure-policy-classification (this does require the Azure Information Protection Premium P2 license, which is available throught the EMS E5 package).