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Security, Compliance, and Identity Blog
3 MIN READ

Integrated and intelligent data governance with Microsoft 365

Shilpa Ranganathan's avatar
Nov 04, 2019

Organizations are rapidly embracing digital transformation, and as a result the amount of data generated is growing exponentially across environments and endpoints. As data continues to grow, organizations are challenged with the lack of information protection and governance solutions across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments. According to Gartner, approximately 80% of the data in organizations is unstructured, not classified, protected, or governed, with little visibility into what is happening with their sensitive and business critical data. As a result, organizations are forced to use traditional and fragmented information protection and governance solutions that work in silos and are not designed to be scalable. This makes it challenging to not only protect and govern data efficiently, but also to navigate through the ever changing compliance requirements.

 

The Information Governance capabilities from Microsoft 365 help you in this journey by providing a unified solution that integrates data from heterogeneous environments, intelligently classifies data with machine learning capabilities, provides remediation and enables records management to meet regulations. This helps users and organizations to intelligently govern data across their environment to reduce risk, thereby easing the path towards meeting compliance needs.

 

 

Automation at scale

Not all information is created equal and every organization on the planet has data that is unique to them, whether these are contracts, invoices, or customer records. Organizations need to review, classify and assign policies in a way that is automated and scalable. Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of trainable classifiers that will harness the power of machine learning capabilities to help you detect and classify data in your organization. We have ‘built-in’ classifiers to detect resumes, offensive language, or source code. You can also create your own classifiers by providing sample data to look for information that is unique to your organization, such as customer records, HR data, contracts, etc.

 

 

At preview, these trainable classifiers can be used with retention labels to help you automatically apply the associated retention or deletion policy. Let us know what you would like to see next in this exciting space through UserVoice.

 

 

Integrated with data within and beyond Microsoft 365

Having your information where it can be easily discovered, retained and purged is critical to meeting your compliance needs and reducing risk. Microsoft 365 compliance center provides you streamlined capabilities that allows you to set policies across services.  

 

 

Today, you already have available options for bringing your data into Microsoft 365 through both our PST email import and the SharePoint migration tool. This year, we have further broadened the data ingestion capabilities by introducing native connectors to third-party systems. These set of connectors allow you to import relevant information from corporate accounts on social media, instant messaging, and document collaboration platforms into the Microsoft cloud to meet numerous compliance requirements.

 

 

Today, we are announcing the public preview of the native connectors gallery within the Microsoft 365 compliance center to discover and manage data from Instant Bloomberg, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. These data connectors benefit Microsoft Information Governance, and a broad set of other solutions from Information Protection to eDiscovery, and we will continue to enhance their scope to include more categories of data outside of Microsoft 365.

 

Meet legal and regulatory requirements with Records Management

For business critical or sensitive data, your organization requires specific workflows to manage regulatory and legal record-keeping compliance. Records Management in Microsoft 365 gives you the ability to manage your complex records retention and disposition workflow efficiently.

 

 

The Records Management solution is currently in public preview. This solution lets you easily onboard and manage complex retention schedules, declare items as immutable records, automate retention based on events. Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of trainable classifiers integrated into Records Management to help categorize your records.

 

Today, we are also rolling out new records versioning capabilities for SharePoint Online which enables continuous record declaration on selected versions of a single document. This capability unlocks collaboration on records while maintaining the necessary immutability required by policies and regulations.

 

 

The new capabilities in Information Governance and Records Management enhance the already rich set of features available in Microsoft 365, including auto-expanding email archive, retention policies, retention labels, disposition review and more. 

 

Information Governance and Records Management solutions are part of the broader set of capabilities in Microsoft Information Protection and Governance. Get access to the new features with the Microsoft 365 E5 trial here https://aka.ms/M365E5ComplianceTrial or navigate to the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center to get started.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Updated May 11, 2021
Version 4.0