New Blog | Dynamic watermarking hits the mark in protecting highly sensitive data

By Anna Chiang

 

In most organizations teams collaborate and handle sensitive and business critical information, such as documents that contain blueprints, entertainment artwork, classified government secrets or strategic alliances. It’s important to protect this high-business value corporate intellectual property at all times to deter data exfiltration. Clear labeling and protection (encryption) of confidential files helps communicate the importance and sensitivity of an item and protects against exfiltration to unauthorized users, as well as can prevent copy and paste, forward or print actions.

 

However, there is a situation where labels and protections aren’t enough. It’s still possible for users to take screenshots or pictures with a camera of confidential files. These pictures can end up in the wrong hands of competitors or the public via website posts.  

 

With Microsoft Purview Information Protection, we provide an integrated solution that is built-in, intelligent, unified, and extensible.  It identifies and protects sensitive data across your digital estate, which includes Microsoft clouds such as Microsoft 365 and Azure, as well as on-premises, hybrid and third-party clouds, and SaaS applications.

 

Today at Inspire, we are excited to announce the public preview of a new Information Protection capability for Microsoft 365 Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files called dynamic watermarking. This highly requested capability enables system admins to configure Purview sensitivity labels that visually displays the reader’s email address and date/timestamp information over the file content to attribute and deter leaks. This is now available to any customers who need to protect high-value Intellectual Property (IP) in various industries.

 

Extending comprehensive protection with differentiated capabilities

Dynamic watermarking is already supported in Teams meetings (), and each participant will see their own email address overlaid on the meeting video or shared content. This deters participants from taking unauthorized screenshots or pictures of the meeting content.

 

The application files that are shared in Teams meetings often consist of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files which can be shared directly with others outside of meetings. There are existing ways to share highly sensitive information accessible only by a list of specific team members, for example using SharePoint user-defined-permissions. Dynamic watermarking extends protection of sensitive data by enabling an extra deterrent to oversharing by attributing the source of any potential leaks to specific people via their email address, as shown in the image below.

 

 

Figure 1: PowerPoint file with dynamic watermarking enabled.

 

Read the full post here: Dynamic watermarking hits the mark in protecting highly sensitive data