No matter what industry you work in – legal, accounting, retail, or something else – document security can quickly become an issue. How do you ensure sensitive documents aren’t accidentally emailed to the wrong person or that confidential files can’t be copied?
If you’re just using folder security at the basic level in your cloud services, that’s not going to help prevent an email with an employee’s SSN being sent to the wrong email address.
34% of surveyed organizations have had sensitive data compromised due to poor document handling practices.
If you’re one of the millions of Office 365 business users, you have a powerful tool at your disposal that can help you solve the document security issue.
Sensitivity labels in Office 365 allow you to tag documents based on content. Those tags can then be attached to specific security policies, such as:
Sensitivity labels can be applied to:
More recently, Microsoft has added the ability for these labels to be applied to the following containers:
Sensitivity labels can be applied manually by the user or by an administrator. They can also be applied automatically based upon the content of a document or email.
Administrators can additionally set up safeguards to ensure all documents as they’re created have a sensitivity label. They can:
Image source: Microsoft
Because sensitivity labels are applied at the document level, they can follow the document throughout a number of your workflow areas. Including:
There are a number of benefits to using sensitivity labels for document security of your MS documents and emails. Here are some smart ways you can deploy them.
Sensitivity labels are completely customizable, meaning you don’t have to follow just “classified, public, etc.” designations.
Look at how your organization uses your documents and how they need to be protected and customize your labels to match your needs.
For example, you may have an R&D department that works on upcoming products. Instead of using just a “confidential” label, create one for “R&D Only” that you can apply specific security policies to. This makes it completely clear to your users who has the ability to read/share/copy documents with that sensitivity label.
Users might not always look at the taskbar of a document to see its sensitivity label. But if you apply a watermark across the file that says “for internal use only” they can’t miss it.
You can mark content by adding headers, footer, or watermarks automatically based upon the sensitivity label of a document. The only type of content these markings can’t be applied to are emails.
You can reduce user confusion over which sensitivity label a particular document they’re creating should have. Microsoft gives you a couple of options to do this.
Sensitivity labels don’t have to apply a specific security policy, they can also be applied to track document usage.
For example, if you’ve sent out a new employee training document and want to know how it’s being received, you can tag it with a sensitivity label that allows you to see how often that document is being opened and shared.
One loophole that could put a protected document in danger is if a user changed a document’s sensitivity label to a less protected setting.
You can prevent this from happening by setting up a rule that requires users to give justification before a sensitivity label can be changed on a document.
Sensitivity labels allow you to apply encryption settings to documents and emails that can deploy a number of protections.
These include:
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