This week, we are thrilled to announce the expansion of the Microsoft Priva family of products. Microsoft Priva was introduced in 2021 to help organizations navigate the complex world of privacy operations. The expansion of Microsoft Priva brings automated capabilities to help organizations meet adapting privacy requirements related to personal data.

Microsoft Priva

Protect personal data, automate risk mitigation, and manage subject rights requests at scale.

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“Understanding and managing privacy is crucial for our clients. Exponential flows of sensitive data and emerging technologies such as generative AI have amplified the need for a strong privacy solution; we are confident in Microsoft’s vision to take on this challenge with Microsoft Priva. The richness of data and activities in Microsoft 365 and Priva’s ability to monitor and action on related workflows allows for a proactive approach to privacy. This capability aligns with our commitment to privacy and data protection, reinforcing our partnership with Microsoft to serve our global clients with solutions that address their privacy management needs.”

—Jon Kessler, Vice President, Information Governance, Epiq Legal Solutions

What will the Priva family address?

In today’s digital landscape, people’s awareness of data privacy has surged to unprecedented levels. Individuals are increasingly aware of the intricate web of data points that define their online existence and how their data is collected and used. This has prompted a collective call for the safeguarding of personal information from unwarranted intrusions and establishing ways for people to take control of their personal data. The public has become more discerning about the need for stringent measures to protect their sensitive data and keep it private. The heightened awareness surrounding individual data privacy rights is not merely a fleeting trend—it’s a fundamental shift in the way society perceives and values the sanctity of personal information.

In response to this evolving landscape, the need to build and maintain customer trust has never been more pronounced. Privacy solutions have emerged to empower organizations to establish transparent and ethical data practices. Building customer trust is about a commitment to empowering individuals to have control over their own data.

Robust privacy solutions are essential for regulatory adherence and in cultivating a culture of transparency, accountability, and respect for user privacy. By embracing more robust privacy solutions, organizations not only fortify their defenses, but they also embark on a journey to forge enduring relationships with their customers—relationships based on mutual trust and data integrity. Beyond regulatory compliance, organizations should use transparent data practices to gain deeper insights into customer preferences, behaviors, and trends. This managed data can become a strategic asset—enabling more informed decision-making, delivering targeted marketing to customers who’ve consent to receive it, and developing personalized services. Prioritizing privacy is not just a legal necessity but a pathway to extracting meaningful and sustainable value from the wealth of data at an organization’s disposal.

Microsoft Priva is here to help your organization meet privacy and compliance requirements

Organizations must mitigate risk for privacy non-compliance and be ready for new and emerging regulations. They need an end-to-end solution that helps them oversee and establish privacy protocols across their entire organization. Microsoft Priva solutions support privacy operations across entire data estates—paving quick and cost-effective paths to meet privacy regulations and avoid the risks of non-compliance. With the Microsoft Priva family, organizations can automate the management, definition, and tracking of privacy procedures at scale to ensure personal data stays private, secure, and compliant with regulations. Let’s take a quick look at each member of the family.

Microsoft Priva Privacy Assessments

Build the foundation of your privacy posture with Microsoft Priva Privacy Assessments—a solution that automates the discovery, documentation, and evaluation of personal data use across your entire data estate. Automate privacy assessments and build a complete compliance record for the responsible use of personal data. Embed your custom privacy risk framework into each assessment to programmatically identify the factors contributing to privacy risk. Lower organizational risk and build trust with your data subjects. Priva Privacy Assessments help at any stage of the privacy journey, enabling you to fully utilize your company’s data while ensuring its proper use.

Key features

• Automate the creation of privacy assessments: Discover and document personal data usage across your data estate through easily created custom assessments.
• Monitor personal data usage: Automate monitoring for changes in data processing activities that require privacy compliance actions.
• Evaluate privacy risks: Design a personalized privacy risk framework and use automated risk analysis based on the data usage information obtained from a privacy assessment.

Microsoft Priva Privacy Risk Management

Microsoft Priva Privacy Risk Management is here to empower you to simplify the identification of unstructured personal data usage. Priva Privacy Risk Management enables you to automate risk mitigation through easily definable policies that conform to your specific needs. It can also help you build a privacy-resilient workplace by identifying personal data and critical privacy risks around it, automating risk mitigation to prevent privacy incidents, and empowering employees to make smart data handling decisions.

Key features

• Identify personal data and critical privacy risks: Gain visibility into your personal data and associated privacy risks arising from overexposure, hoarding, and transfers with automated data discovery, user mapping intelligence, and correlated signals.
• Automate risk mitigation and prevent privacy incidents: Effectively mitigate privacy risks and prevent privacy incidents with automated policies and recommended user actions.
• Empower employees to make smart data handling decisions: Foster a proactive privacy culture by increasing awareness of and accountability towards privacy risks without hindering employee productivity.

Microsoft Priva Tracker Scanning

With data privacy regulation laws surrounding tracking technologies continuously evolving—and fines for non-compliance exponentially increasing—organizations need a platform that enables them to avoid risk and standardize tracking compliance at scale. Microsoft Priva Tracker Scanning empowers organizations to automate the discovery and categorization of tracking technologies—including cookies, pixels, and beacons—across all their websites. With Priva Tracker Scanning, organizations can remediate risks for tracker non-compliance, effectively monitor website compliance, and easily address compliance issues. Priva Tracker Scanning enables your organization to embolden your privacy posture for maximum control and visibility.

Key features

• Register and scan web domains: Automate scans for various forms of trackers—empowering you to quickly identify and categorize all tracking technologies on your websites.
• Evaluate and manage web trackers: Use flexible scan configurations to easily identify missing compliance elements across your websites.
• Streamline compliance reporting: Scan for areas of non-compliance and monitor compliance issues throughout the lifecycle of websites.

Microsoft Priva Consent Management

Gain better value from your user-consented data and meet today’s most challenging data privacy regulations with an approach to streamlining consent management and consented data usage. Built by harnessing Microsoft’s extensive experience and expertise in privacy operations, Microsoft Priva Consent Management provides a solution for bolstering your organization’s personal data consent management and publishing capabilities in a simplified and streamlined manner.

Key features

• Create customizable and regulatory-compliant consent models: Quickly author dynamic consent models using prebuilt templates for easy deployment.
• Streamline the deployment of consent models: Use a centralized process to publish consent models at scale to multiple regions.
• Organization specific layouts: Create on-brand layouts for consent models that conform to changing business needs.

Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests

With personal data often distributed across multiple environments, organizations need a solution that enables them to fulfill and manage subject rights requests across their entire data estate for maximum visibility. Crafted from Microsoft’s extensive experience and expertise in data privacy operations, Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests is a next-generation privacy solution that enables organizations to automate the fulfillment of subject rights requests across their on-premises, hybrid, and multicloud environments. With Priva Subject Rights Request, organizations can manage the access, deletion, and export of subject rights requests across their entire data landscape. to help build trust with customers.

Key features

• Efficiently manage subject rights requests: Streamline the fulfillment of subject rights request tasks using configurable settings within your workflows, providing end-to-end oversight of subject rights request operations.
• Discover personal data across various data types and locations: Discover and manage subject rights requests across multicloud data estates, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and third-party data sources like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and more.
• Create low-code data agents to automate task fulfillment: Create low-code agents to automatically find and fulfill personal data requests using Microsoft Power Automate.

Learn more about new Priva capabilities at the IAPP Global Privacy Summit

From April 2 to 5, 2024, the world’s largest forum for exploring privacy and data protection law, regulation, policy, management, and operations takes place in Washington, D.C. The International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Summit is a key event for information privacy professionals to learn about innovative solutions and expand your privacy and data protection network. Microsoft will have a strong presence with a spotlight feature, breakout sessions, and networking events. Check the agenda for times and locations for these events and more:

Spotlight stage: Microsoft Priva Privacy—Paul Brightmore, Head of Product for Microsoft Privacy, and Terrell Cox, Vice President (VP) of Privacy Engineering at Microsoft, will be featured on the spotlight stage sharing about Microsoft Priva privacy solutions.

Breakout session: Managing Privacy at Scale—Explore how large organizations keep pace with today’s privacy obligations, share strategies and tools available to manage privacy at scale, and share updates on the latest privacy governance tools. Get insight into the emerging role of AI in managing privacy.

Mainstage session: Regulator’s Agenda—Shifting Priorities and Practices—Julie Brill, Chief Privacy Officer, Corporate VP, Global Privacy, Safety and Regulatory Affairs at Microsoft, moderates this discussion where you’ll learn the top priorities of privacy authorities, understand how AI governance factors into the Data Protection Authorities’ 2024 plans, and review lessons learned from recent privacy enforcement actions.

VIP reception—Microsoft is hosting this event to bring privacy experts together on April 3, 2024. This event promises an engaging showcase of Priva demonstrations, enriching conversations, and valuable insights within the field of privacy. 

CDT Spring Fling—Microsoft is the lead sponsor of this reception organized in partnership with the Center for Democracy in Technology. The event includes a panel discussion on AI as a catalyst for ushering in the next era of data governance. Julie Brill, Chief Privacy Officer, Corporate VP, Global Privacy, Safety and Regulatory Affairs at Microsoft, will be speaking on this panel.

LGBTQ+ Allies After Party—Registration and tickets are required in advance for this Wednesday, April 3, 2024, afterparty at Pitchers. We hope to see you there.

Optimize your privacy operations today, and streamline compliance adherence

Thanks for taking the time to get to know the members of the Microsoft Priva suite of products. We’re so excited to continue to be your trusted partner in helping you meet your privacy and compliance regulations. Please check in on the Priva family from time to time to stay informed about our products.

Interested in learning more now? Head over to the Microsoft Priva homepage. To get a deeper dive into our product capabilities, read our Tech Community post or watch our video.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Microsoft Priva announces new solutions to help modernize your privacy program appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

NIS2 key features 

As we take a closer look at the key features of NIS2, we see the new directive includes risk assessments, multifactor authentication, security procedures for employees with access to sensitive data, and more. NIS2 also includes requirements around supply chain security, incident management, and business recovery plans. In total, the comprehensive framework ups the bar from previous requirements to bring: 

• Stronger requirements and more affected sectors.
• A focus on securing business continuity—including supply chain security.
• Improved and streamlined reporting obligations.
• More serious repercussions—including fines and legal liability for management.
• Localized enforcement in all EU Member States. 

Preparing for NIS2 may take considerable effort for organizations still working through digital transformation. But it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. 

NIS2 guiding principles guide

Get started on your transformation with three guiding principles for preparing for NIS2.

Download the guide today

Proactive defense: The future of cloud security

At Microsoft, our approach to NIS2 readiness is a blend of technical insight, innovative strategies, and deep legal understanding. We’re dedicated to nurturing a security-first mindset—one that’s ingrained in every aspect of our operations and resonates with the tech community’s ethos. Our strategy for NIS2 compliance addresses the full range of risks associated with cloud technology. And we’re committed to ensuring that Microsoft’s cloud services set the benchmark for regulatory compliance and cybersecurity excellence in the tech world. Now more than ever, cloud technology is integral to business operations. With NIS2, organizations are facing a fresh set of security protocols, risk management strategies, and incident response tactics. Microsoft cloud security management tools are designed to tackle these challenges head-on, helping to ensure a secure digital environment for our community.  

NIS2 compliance aligns to the same Zero Trust principles addressed by Microsoft Security solutions, which can help provide a solid wall of protection against cyberthreats across any organization’s entire attack surface. If your security posture is aligned with Zero Trust, you’re well positioned to assess and help assure your organization’s compliance with NIS2. 

For effective cybersecurity, it takes a fully integrated approach to protection and streamlined threat investigation and response. Microsoft Security solutions provide just that, with: 

• Microsoft Sentinel – Gain visibility and manage threats across your entire digital estate with a modern security information and event management (SIEM). 
• Microsoft XDR – Stop attacks and coordinate response across assets with extended detection and response (XDR) built into Microsoft 365 and Azure. 
• Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence – Expose and eliminate modern threats using dynamic cyberthreat intelligence. 

Next steps for navigating new regulatory terrain 

The introduction of NIS2 is reshaping the cybersecurity landscape. We’re at the forefront of this transformation, equipping tech professionals—especially Chief Information Security Officers and their teams—with the knowledge and tools to excel in this new regulatory environment. To take the next step for NIS2 in your organization, download our NIS2 guiding principles guide or reach out to your Microsoft account team to learn more. 

Learn more

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity. 

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Microsoft respects the vital role that privacy plays with customers. We provide solutions that help organizations meet their privacy obligations, and today we are excited to announce enhancements to Microsoft Priva.

Microsoft Priva

Protect personal data, automate risk mitigation, and manage subject rights requests at scale.

Learn more

How can Microsoft Priva help?

Microsoft Priva brings automated functionality to help organizations meet adapting privacy requirements related to personal data. Today, Microsoft Priva offers two solutions:

Microsoft Priva Privacy Risk Management

Microsoft Priva Privacy Risk Management helps organizations manage privacy risks related to data hoarding, data overexposure, and data transfers, and empowers employees to make better data-handling decisions. Priva Privacy Risk Management supports organizations by:

• Identifying personal data and privacy risks: It allows organizations to leverage auto-classification technology to identify more than 308 personal data types in the Microsoft 365 environment, with no configuration needed. Admins can see personal data by location, geography, and types. In addition to helping organizations know their personal data landscape, Microsoft Priva also detects the associated risks around personal data and gives admins actionable insights.

• Automating mitigation and preventing privacy incidents: Organizations can create policies from pre-configured templates to automate privacy risk mitigation:
  • Data minimization: Helps detect unused personal data, send users email digests to review and delete obsolete items, and provides privacy training to reduce data hoarding.
  • Data transfer: Helps detect personal data movements between customizable boundaries, such as geography or departments, and blocks risky transfers in near real time.
  • Data overexposure: Helps detect personal data overshare, informs file owners to review and adjust access, and provides privacy training to reduce overexposure incidents.

• Empowering employees to make smart data-handling decisions: Admins can configure Priva to help employees make better data-handling decisions, as no one knows the value of their files more than the data owner. Microsoft Priva can trigger a system-generated email or Microsoft Teams message to a data owner with recommended actions and privacy best practices—right in their flow of work.  

Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests

Depending on where you are in the world today, there will be varying privacy regulations that impact your business, and even if you’re not impacted much today, chances are that it’s a matter of time before they are enabled. Many of these privacy regulations empower people to exercise their rights over their data, requesting that the organizations they do business with or work for provide a log of all personal data collected. For organizations, the process of completing subject rights requests can be a manual, complex, time-consuming, and expensive process, that is also time bound. Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests help organizations manage requests at scale and with confidence by:

• Automating discovery: Gathers the requestor’s personal information and detects data conflicts such as sensitive information or data pertaining to other users.
• In-place review and secure collaboration: Review and redact files located in the live system in their native views without creating duplicate copies and bring collaboration to a protected platform.
• Ecosystem integration: Plugs into organizations existing processes to manage requests in a unified way across digital estate. Microsoft Graph subject rights requests API integrates Priva Subject Rights Requests with in-house or partner-built privacy solutions.

Enhancements to Microsoft Priva

Updates to Microsoft Priva include added customization, better insights, easier collaboration, powerful review options, and so much more.

What’s new with Microsoft Priva Privacy Risk Management?

Deeper data viewpoints

The data minimization policy in Privacy Risk Management has been a highly resonating privacy scenario. With this update of day zero insights, admins will be able to view data minimization policy insights 72 hours after starting Priva, with a view of data up to the past 90 days. Previously, customers would have waited at least 30 days to catch policy matches. With a better history of data, privacy admins can understand privacy trends better, and use these data points to strategize the best approach for their organizations.

Better together integration

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager offers data protection and privacy assessment templates that correspond to compliance regulations and industry standards around the world. Now available is Microsoft Priva working hand-in-hand with Compliance Manager. With this update, admins can take specific actions within Microsoft Priva that achieve points that count toward assessment completion and increase the overall compliance score. Examples of actions that can detect and provide credit include admins setting up a Privacy Risk Management policy, or enabling data retention limits for a subject rights request—prompting collaboration that yields better together productivity. 

Figure 1. Visual of Compliance Manager recognizing actions taken within the Priva solution in the “improvement actions” section of Compliance Manager. 

Additionally, insights from Compliance Manager will now populate within Priva itself. This update brings recommendations on actions that will help admins align to regulations and improve their score in Compliance Manager. 

What’s new with Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests?

Fulfill more request types

Many regulations, including General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act include the right to be forgotten, giving people the ability to request the deletion of all the information an organization has collected about them, with a few outlined exceptions that allow data retention. Today, we are excited to share that Priva Subject Rights Requests delete is now generally available—admins can now select delete as a request type, or get started with the delete template and get purpose-built flows that help surface conflicts and streamline deletion (leveraging the Microsoft retention and deletion platform and working better together with teams already using data lifecycle management and records management). This feature will also enable admins to have the flexibility to select different approvers for any given request and, once the workflow is complete, access the reports tab where they can view their summary report and review results.

Figure 2. Stage three of five of a delete subject rights requests in progress within the Priva Subject Rights Request solution.

Watch this short video to see Priva Subject Rights Requests delete in action.

Learn more

As the data protection landscape continues to shift, many organizations are working to prioritize the privacy needs of a data-driven world. We welcome you to learn more about how Microsoft Priva can help and invite you to try Microsoft Priva free today. 

Visit our latest Tech Community Priva blog for additional Microsoft Priva updates and details.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and Twitter (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹From Privacy Vulnerability to Privacy Resilience, Microsoft. August 2022.

²Gartner®State of Privacy: The Privacy Tech Driving a New Age of Data Wealth. August 2022.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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To help our customers navigate this complex data landscape, we are focused on delivering secure, intelligent, and user-centric solutions that provide visibility, reduce complexity, and mitigate risk. Over the past few years, we significantly increased our investment in building our Microsoft Purview data security capabilities across our information protection, data loss prevention (DLP), and insider risk management solutions, as well as our privacy solution: Microsoft Priva. A few recent capabilities are advanced ready-to-use machine learning-enabled classifiers, Adaptive Protection, a DLP migration assistant tool (on-premises DLP to cloud-native DLP), and right to be forgotten for Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests.

I am delighted to announce that Forrester listed Microsoft as a Leader in its  2023 Wave™ for Data Security Platforms. The Forrester Wave™ report evaluates the data security platform market and provides a detailed overview of the current offering, strategy, and market presence of these vendors. Microsoft received the highest possible score in the current offering category for data classification, data threat and risk visibility, data masking or redaction, encryption, rights management, privacy use cases, and integrations for Zero Trust criteria; and in the strategy category for the product vision, execution roadmap, and community engagement criteria.  

We believe our investments in advanced classification technology, data threats and risk visibility, rights management, and privacy resulted in this recognition.

The Forrester report also acknowledges: “Microsoft shines with its ecosystem approach—if you go all in,” wrote Heidi Shey, Forrester Principal Analyst, in the report. “Microsoft Purview brings together capabilities to 1. understand and govern data; 2. safeguard data; and 3. improve risk and compliance posture. But Microsoft’s security capabilities go beyond Microsoft Purview. By design, the entire Microsoft ecosystem working together multiplies its value via telemetry from across the environment.” She added, “The power of Microsoft’s telemetry is evident in its capabilities for identifying data threats and risk visibility. These offer strong controls for data masking, encryption, and rights management.”

Our work isn’t stopping there, however. We continue to work closely with our customers to gather feedback to help us build better products. Your input provides critical insights as we strive to create solutions to help you on your data security journey.

Learn more

Read this complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave™: Data Security Platforms, Q1 2023 for the analysis behind Microsoft’s position as a Leader.

Read more about Microsoft’s recognition as a leader in cloud security, email security, security analytics, and more:

• Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in 2022 Enterprise Detection and Response Wave™ report.
• Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in Q4 2022 Security Analytics Platforms Wave report
• Microsoft achieves a Leader placement in Forrester Wave for XDR, Q4 2021.
• Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Security Gateways, Q2 2021.
• Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in the 2021 Enterprise Email Security Wave.
• Microsoft is a Leader in the 2021 Forrester Endpoint Security Software as a Service Wave.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and Twitter (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022, IBM. 2022.

The Forrester Wave™ is copyrighted by Forrester Research, Inc. Forrester and Forrester Wave™ are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. The Forrester Wave™ is a graphical representation of Forrester’s call on a market and is plotted using a detailed spreadsheet with exposed scores, weightings, and comments. Forrester does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in the Forrester Wave™. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.

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The downside? Using multiple cloud platforms can create inconsistent infrastructures that don’t scale across environments. This can lead to teams working in silos—bringing increased complexity, additional costs, network security gaps, and risks to business-critical applications and data. It’s not unheard of for some organizations to own 80 to 100 different security tools stitched across hybrid and multicloud environments, while still wondering: are we secure? In this blog, we’ll help you answer that question by detailing four qualities a multicloud data-protection solution should provide and how Microsoft Purview can help unify security, compliance, and data protection across your enterprise.

Multiple clouds require unified data protection

Enabling multicloud integration and automation at scale is essential for fostering a robust partner ecosystem. Since 89 percent of enterprise customers have moved to a multicloud environment, maintaining security across your expanding data estate is necessary.¹ Patchwork solutions can create vulnerabilities; whereas, a comprehensive solution is able to deliver seamless data protection and data governance across your entire digital estate.

Look for a multicloud security and data-protection solution that:

1. Unifies auto-discovery and protection of sensitive data. Your multicloud data-protection solution should provide comprehensive security and compliance tools that span both first- and third-party apps and services to include Personally Identifiable Information (PII), such as home addresses, date of birth, and Social Security Numbers. Look for features such as built-in sensitivity labeling within applications and services, including popup user notifications that help guide users on security best practices. These features help ensure all sensitive data is correctly classified and labeled so that files can’t be exfiltrated without proper permissions.
   
   A data-protection solution with rights management and automatic encryption of emails (and attachments), as well as co-authoring of encrypted documents, will help to ensure secure collaboration. Your multicloud security tool should be flexible enough to allow manual labeling of some sensitive files for leadership-only access (like mergers and acquisitions projects), while also enabling admins to automatically label and protect business files stored in Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Teams (like Confidential labels for Finance or HR records). This tool should also be able to scan and classify on-premises file shares, as well as cloud applications and services.
2. Protects sensitive files and documents from being exfiltrated to third-party applications and services. More than 40 percent of corporate data is dark.² Meaning, it’s not classified, protected, or governed. This invites risk in the form of sensitive data leakage, which can harm your reputation and, in the case of leaked PII, lead to costly litigation. Your multicloud security solution should be able to classify files and documents, apply sensitivity labels, provide sharing controls and file governance, and use near real-time data loss prevention policies to prevent data leakage across third-party apps.
3. Uses automated data discovery across structured and unstructured data. Every organization needs to be able to securely share data both internally and with partners and customers. That’s why your data protection solution needs to provide data scanning and classification for all types of assets across multicloud and on-premises environments. Metadata and descriptions of data assets should be integrated into a holistic map of your data estate. Atop this map, purpose-built apps can create environments for data discovery, access management, and insights about your data landscape.
4. Applies Zero Trust principles to your entire digital estate. This includes strong multifactor authentication to verify user identities, as well as ensuring all endpoints are in compliance. Your data-protection solution should also ensure that governance and compliance policies are built in, and continuous risk assessment and forensics capabilities are implemented. Other key functions should include classifying, labeling, and encrypting emails and documents, as well as adaptive access to software as a service (SaaS) applications and on-premises applications.

Integrate for comprehensive protection

Overcoming the siloed approach in a multicloud environment can be a challenge. However, the risks are too great to make do with ad-hoc, patchwork security solutions. Beyond PII, also at stake is your business’s intellectual property (IP), financial statements, organizational structures, employee contacts, and other information that could be targeted with ransomware, phishing, and password attacks.

Microsoft Purview’s information protection and governance capabilities help your organization address potential data vulnerabilities across a multicloud environment by integrating information protection and data lifecycle management, along with data loss prevention, insider risk management, and eDiscovery. Microsoft Purview’s data governance portal helps manage your entire data landscape—on-premises, multicloud, and SaaS—allowing you to create a comprehensive, up-to-date map of your data wherever it resides. This unified governance enables data curators and security admins to keep your data secure; all while empowering users to find the trustworthy data they need.

Microsoft Priva adds another layer of protection with privacy risk management, helping to identify data-privacy risks and automate mitigation wherever the data lives. To accommodate individuals making requests to review or manage their personal data about themselves, Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests includes the Microsoft Graph subject rights requests API. This powerful API helps your organization do more with less by automating searches across Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft OneDrive, SharePoint, or Teams.

And to protect the business-critical apps you rely on, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps you classify sensitive information using real-time controls that monitor data accessed across your multicloud environment. As a cloud access security broker (CASB), Defender for Cloud Apps blocks attacks against your apps using automated identity governance, and it integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Entra Permissions Management to root out and remediate permission risks.

Look for a built-in data protection solution

Any data-protection solution needs to address the four areas discussed—unified discovery and protection, protection against data exfiltration, control of unstructured data, and a foundation of Zero Trust—across hybrid and multicloud environments. Both Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure are purpose-built with Zero Trust as a core architectural principle. And with comprehensive, integrated solutions for information protection, data governance, risk management, and compliance, Microsoft Purview builds on all four pillars—so you can move forward, fearless.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹How Many Companies Use Cloud Computing in 2022? All You Need To Know, Jacquelyn Bulao, Tech Jury, November 26, 2022.

²Unlocking the hidden value of dark data, Maria Korolov, CIO. August 11, 2022.

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When organizations respond to subject rights requests, they are both meeting their regulatory requirements and providing people with control over their personal data. Although responding to requests can be quite complex, Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests can help ease the process—and with the preview arrival of Right to be Forgotten, Priva Subject Rights Requests can further support how organizations respect the privacy of their customers and employees.

Understanding how people think about privacy

As many businesses around the world adapt their privacy practices, having both the tools that help address privacy requirements and a good understanding of how consumers perceive and feel about privacy are key to enabling trust with customers. Microsoft Priva, the brand category for Microsoft Security, was announced at Microsoft Ignite in 2021 by Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity.² Priva solidified our commitment to supporting organizations in their privacy journey with products that help safeguard personal data and manage subject rights requests at scale. For organizations, having processes that help manage their privacy is critical, but it is also valuable to have a deep understanding of how people really think about privacy to guide their practices. We recently commissioned privacy research that explores the emotional textures of privacy and what triggers privacy vulnerability. We learned that when businesses empathize with the privacy concerns people have and transparently address them, they foster trust and differentiate themselves from competitors.

It’s important for organizations to assess the varying causes that spark privacy vulnerability for both their consumers and their business. For example, a consumer may feel anxious or helpless because they don’t know how their personal data is being used. However, if they are provided with transparency of how their data is being used and given clear options that enable the control of their data, their insecurities could be eased and trust in the process earned. For a business, privacy vulnerability could present itself through limited transparency or basic compliance—leaving room for privacy risk to potentially unfold. For instance, a business that might fulfill a data subject request unconvincingly, or with basic effort, could be managing its privacy at a vulnerable level. If that business were to practice a “beyond-compliance,” human-centered privacy approach, they could yield practices that help them build privacy resilience—helping them stand apart from their competitors while they earn trust from their customers.

Figure 1. The differing perspectives of consumers and businesses regarding privacy vulnerability versus privacy resilience.

The above figure demonstrates a privacy scale ranging from vulnerable to resilient and includes both consumer and business perspectives. On the consumer side, it ranges from feeling anxious, helpless, and lacking knowledge or motivation in protective coverage to secure, being in control, trusting the process, and being skilled in protective coverage. On the business side, it ranges from basic compliance, limited transparency, minimal control, and reactive approaches to beyond compliance, authentic privacy care, reciprocating data for value, and a proactive approach to consumer protection.

Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests can help

Many times, even though an organization may be focused on a proactive privacy approach, managing and responding to subject rights requests can be a tedious and cumbersome process. It can be extremely time-consuming and taxing as they are also time-bound, bringing extra complexity to the organization. Responding to these requests often requires a tremendous amount of collaboration and manual review, and producing just a single request can be quite expensive. Nonetheless, completing these requests is not just an obligatory requirement, but also a tangible way that expresses respect for customer and employee privacy.

Priva helps organizations more efficiently manage requests at scale—Priva Subject Rights Requests automates the search and collection of content relevant to the data subject and facilitates tasks such as in-line review, redaction, and collaboration, all from an easy-to-use dashboard. Admins can easily get started by leveraging request templates that help them create requests with recommended default configurations and use Microsoft Power Automate integration, as well as API support to better fit into their existing processes.

Figure 2. Priva Subject Rights Requests overview dashboard showing insights.

Priva Subject Rights Requests help admins meet the strict deadlines associated with regulations like GDPR and ease the administrative burden of tedious tasks related to collection, review, and redaction. Completing a request also often requires teamwork from various departments within the organization. Priva provides secure collaboration through Microsoft Teams and keeps a history tab, highlighting actions taken from all collaborators for easy auditing—streamlining the complexity of requests from beginning to post-completion.

Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests highlights:

• Automates discovery: Gathers the requestor’s personal information and detects data conflicts such as sensitive information or data pertaining to other users.
• In-place review and secure collaboration: Review files in place in their native views, perform redactions in-line with built-in tools, and consolidate collaboration within a protected platform.
• Ecosystem integration: Plugs into an organization’s existing process to manage requests in a unified way across the digital estate. Microsoft Graph subject rights requests API integrates Priva Subject Rights Requests with in-house or partner-built privacy solutions.

The newest Priva Subject Rights Requests update, Right to be Forgotten, is here

Video 1. Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests (SRRs) new feature Right to be Forgotten is now in preview. See how we demonstrate going through a delete request using Microsoft Priva.

Both GDPR and CCPA include the Right to be Forgotten, giving people the ability to request the deletion of all the information an organization has collected about them, with a few outlined exceptions that allow data retention. For example, a former employee in an EU-based company believes she left documents containing her personal data in SharePoint. The employee can exercise her right to her personal data and make a subject rights request for deletion with that organization. As Priva Subject Rights Requests continues to evolve, we are excited to share the preview release of Right to be Forgotten, helping organizations meet requests such as the employee’s request for deletion.

This marks a significant update for Priva Subject Rights Requests as with this new feature, admins can now select delete as a request type, or get started with the delete template and get purpose-built flows that help surface conflicts and streamline deletion—leveraging the Microsoft retention and deletion platform and working better together with teams already using data lifecycle management and records management. This feature will also enable admins to have the flexibility to select different approvers for any given request and, once the workflow is complete, access to the reports tab where they can view their summary report and review results.

Figure 4. Delete request in the approval stage, showcasing approver details and the complete approval button.

Learn more

Although completing subject rights requests can be complex, Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests can help ease the process. As organizations continue to adapt to the privacy changes that impact their customers and their business, we are reminded that although changes to the privacy landscape are inevitable, there are resources to support these shifts. We invite you to learn more about Priva Subject Rights Requests by downloading our free eBook and encourage you to try Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests free trial today.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹State of Privacy: The Privacy Tech Driving a New Age of Data Wealth, Gartner®. August 2022.

²Protect your business with Microsoft Security’s comprehensive protection, Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft Security. November 2, 2021.

The post Simplify privacy protection with Microsoft Priva Subject Rights Requests appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

At this year’s Microsoft Ignite event, I co-hosted a special presentation on how your security and compliance teams can better manage risk, govern your data (wherever it resides), and maintain compliance. We also shared new product updates and insights to help your team get the most from your Microsoft security investments, as well as announced an exciting new capability that integrates Microsoft Purview natively within Adobe Acrobat. This type of extensible, multicloud, and multiplatform protection allows you to get more from the tools you already have. In this blog post, we’ll look at some of those scenarios where Microsoft Purview and Priva can help simplify data governance across your enterprise today.

New Adobe and Microsoft Purview integration delivers seamless security

Microsoft Purview’s mission is to help customers protect their entire data estate: that includes non-Microsoft environments as well. At this year’s Ignite presentation, we demonstrated a new capability that integrates Microsoft Purview Information Protection natively within the desktop version of Adobe Acrobat—accessible directly from the Protect tool. That means users now have the ability to apply and edit information-protection labels and policies directly to PDF documents. This integration brings the same classification, labeling, and protection already available in Microsoft Office file formats to PDF.

Over the next few months, we’ll continue to add new features that enhance support for PDFs in Acrobat add-ins, as well as for Acrobat Export PDF and mobile versions.

Streamlining data protection

Data is the lifeblood of your organization. It provides crucial insights that give your business a competitive advantage and empowers your employees to do more. For that reason, it’s critical to protect your data at every stage—from creation to storage—both from external threats and internal risks. That requires creating a layered defense strategy.

The first layer of defense: Discover and understand the sensitive data within your organization. You need to know where your data is, who’s accessing it, how it’s being shared and stored, and where it’s traveling. Considering that data storage is forecast to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 19.2 percent from 2020 to 2025, gaining complete visibility over your data estate is crucial.¹ At this first line of defense, Microsoft Purview Information Protection helps you classify and label your data across your entire data estate, both on-premises and in multicloud environments. By providing a single pane of glass to track and manage your data, Microsoft Purview helps to improve your team’s efficiency while tightening data protection.

Recent updates for Microsoft Purview Information Protection:

• Improvements in built-in features for Office that enhance visibility and encourage user adoption of sensitivity labels (such as the sensitivity label bar in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook; also, PDFs created in Office now inherit the source file’s sensitivity, encryption, and content marks).
• General availability: Co-authoring on documents protected with Microsoft Purview Information Protection is now generally available for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Office Mobile applications on Android and iOS devices.
• Preview: 42 new credentials for sensitive information that enable organizations to detect a wide range of digital authentication types (also known as “secrets”), such as user credentials, default passwords, and API and token access keys for Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google cloud resources.
• Preview: Server-side auto-labeling support for more than 24 new pre-trained, out-of-the-box classifiers that can be used to quickly discover and auto-classify more than 100 types of sensitive content in categories such as intellectual property (IP) and trade secrets, healthcare, operations, financial information, and HR-related information.

Lowering insider risk

Data breaches arising from insider actions are estimated to cost businesses an average of USD7.5 million annually. For that reason, it’s important to understand all data access and usage patterns within your organization. What does normal activity look like? Which types of activity should be flagged as risky? Understanding internal data usage can help protect against compliance violations and worse, including IP theft, insider trading, confidentiality violations, and other damaging outcomes.

The second layer of defense: Manage data security risks within your organization. Working in tandem with a holistic approach to managing internal risk, Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management identifies potential risks and enables security teams to quickly take action. By bringing together the right people, processes, training, and tools, organizations that approach insider risk holistically are more likely to emphasize user privacy, foster collaboration, and use positive deterrents such as training and feedback loops as part of their data-protection strategy. The one-click analytics report allows you to generate aggregated, de-identified insights on risky activity over the past 48 hours—before you’ve even set up your first policy. Insights include the percentage of users who have performed exfiltration activities, such as downloading sensitive data, with an additional breakdown by activity type. To learn more about potential risks within your own organization, view the new Microsoft insider risk report.

All names in insider risk alerts are pseudonymized by default. This helps your data security team take a privacy-first approach. By clicking on a specific alert, you’ll be able to see a summary of all of the risk factors. Sequencing allows you to correlate across activities that involve the same files. This correlation can help your security team understand the possible intent behind the activities so you can reduce time to action. For example, you might see that just before a user submitted their resignation, they downloaded and exfiltrated confidential files, then deleted the files from their device to cover their tracks. Understanding this sequence of activities helps your security team decide when and how to take action.

Using sequences as triggers for your policies improves the signal quality of your alerts and focuses policy detection on users who have performed multiple-stage sequences. Priority Content Only Scoring, configurable in the policy wizard, empowers your team to focus policy detection on the most sensitive content. All of these insights help you better understand potential risks, so you can set up policies that meet the unique needs of your organization. With this information, analysts in your organization can take appropriate actions to help make sure users remain in compliance.

Recent updates for Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management:

• Preview: Enhancements to triage and detection capabilities, including new abilities to customize a security trigger in the “data leaks” policy to surface when a user performs a sequence, to create policies with sequences without any other required underlying policy indicator selections, and fine-tune security policies directly from the alert review experience.
• Preview: Information type and trainable classifier exclusions, which means that actions related to file activities on the endpoint, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, or Exchange will not generate alerts if the excluded sensitive information type or trainable classifier is matched with the content of the activity performed by the user.
• Preview: Ability to prioritize alerts for potential high-impact users with new risk booster score capabilities. Alerts for users found to have a potentially higher impact will have a higher priority alert in the dashboard, based on the frequency of accessing higher sensitivity content, like sensitive information types, labels, or priority content, compared with others in the organization, and if they are a leader in the organization based on Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) configurations.

Protecting against data loss

The third layer of defense: Incorporate an integrated, in-depth approach to prevent data loss or unauthorized use. Among business leaders who responded to a 2021 survey, 62 percent felt that their companies should do more to protect customer data.² Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) provides a balance between protection and productivity, ensuring the proper access controls are in place and policies are set to prevent actions such as improperly saving, storing, or printing sensitive data.  

Recent updates for Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention:

• Preview: Ability to create groups of printers, removable storage, network share path, and sensitive sites, as well as assign different restrictive actions to each group. As an example, you will be able to block the printing of sensitive information on all printer groups and allow printing on your corporate printers.  
• Preview: Ability to configure complex policy rules using “AND/OR/NOT” associations and create nested groups. 
• Preview: Visibility into contextual evidence, including sensitive content, surrounding characters, and other metadata on a DLP policy match on endpoint devices.
• Preview: Improvements in the speed of detecting and classifying sensitive content shared on Teams chat and channel messages to enforce DLP policies. 
• General availability: Ability to detect the presence of password-protected files on endpoint devices and configure specific restrictions for these files. 

These three components—Information Protection, Insider Risk Management, and Data Loss Prevention—form an integrated, holistic data-protection strategy that helps keep your organization’s data safe, wherever it lives.

Automating privacy

As more countries enact modern General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) type regulations, consumers are demanding better controls over their data. This has spurred more organizations to move from a compliance-driven approach to privacy toward a more human-centric one. Toward that goal, Microsoft Priva currently offers two products to help manage privacy:

Privacy Risk Management helps organizations identify personal data and critical privacy risks and empowers employees to make smart data-handling decisions. With Priva, admins can configure a data minimization policy—automatically triggering an email to the data owner—so the person can review and delete unused files right from their Outlook inbox.

Subject Rights Requests help organizations manage requests at scale and respond with confidence. With the new pre-configured templates, admins can quickly create a data export request for a former employee. Once the data is collected, Priva can automatically detect files containing co-mingled personal data or confidential information; then admins can review and redact the data to avoid leakage. With the latest update, admins can now import files outside of Microsoft 365 to leverage this powerful review experience. Learn more about these new updates in this Priva Tech Community post.

Additional product updates

We’re also adding new features and capabilities within other product areas in our Microsoft Purview portfolio. These new features and enhancements will benefit your organization through granular eDiscovery, comprehensive audit controls, more effective data lifecycle management, and easier compliance.

Enhanced eDiscovery for the cloud

• Helping organizations meet their regulatory obligations for discovery, Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Premium) now supports the ability to discover the exact version of a needed document, even when originally shared as a cloud attachment. This feature is currently available in preview.
• Drive efficiency across eDiscovery processes with improved usability and workflows. To learn more, read the eDiscovery blog post.

New search experience and security controls for Microsoft Purview Audit

• Improved search experience for Microsoft Purview Audit is now generally available and provides the following key improvements:
  • Search jobs continue to run, even if you close the browser.
  • Completed search jobs are now stored for 30 days, giving organizations the ability to reference and re-use historical audit searches.
  • Export up to half a million records in each search.
  • Each Purview Audit user can perform up to 10 concurrent search jobs at the same time.
• Given the sensitivity of Audit log data, many organizations want to add additional layers of protection to their data. Customer Key, coming soon to preview, allows organizations to use their own data encryption keys, giving them complete control over access to their data. To learn more, read the Advanced Audit blog post.

Microsoft Graph APIs and Power Automate workflows for Data Lifecycle Management

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management helps organizations manage the lifecycle of data. You can automatically retain, delete, and store data and records in a compliant manner. This solution delivers on our vision to protect and govern data wherever it lives. We have four exciting releases to tell you about:

• Power Automate integration helps you to customize lifecycle management workflows to meet your organization’s unique requirements. Now in preview. To learn more, read the Data Lifecycle Management blog.
• The ability to apply retention labels to files in Microsoft Teams enables users to apply retention and deletion settings where they do their work—in the Files tab of a Teams channel. Now generally available.
• Our new feature to find and retain cloud attachments helps admins undertaking investigations, as well as helping to meet financial services industry regulations. This feature keeps and associates the version of a file shared in a Teams message or email for later retrieval through eDiscovery (Premium). Now in preview.
• Microsoft Graph APIs for Records Management help organizations create new retention labels and manage event-based retention (now in beta). This release is our first round of APIs, with more coming in 2023.

Enhanced compliance and data residency

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager helps organizations simplify compliance and reduce risk. It translates complex regulatory requirements into specific controls, allowing organizations to constantly assess, monitor, and improve their compliance posture—all while saving time and money. So, what’s new in Compliance Manager?

• New templates: Easily translate more than 350 regulations into tangible actions for your organization to improve its compliance posture.
• Continuous assessments: Last year we announced the ability to eliminate blind spots by adding continuous testing for technical controls. Today, we’re excited to share that we’ve added Microsoft Priva and App Governance as our newest first-party solutions.

More to come

I’d be remiss to not talk to you about some of the exciting capabilities we have coming up. For Microsoft Purview, you will start to see integrations across Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure to help increase the visibility of your data and easily automate data classification. For Microsoft Priva, you’ll soon see more multicloud privacy management capabilities that help you automate privacy controls and strengthen your privacy program. To learn more about potential risks within your own organization, read the new Microsoft insider risk report. Also, be sure to read Microsoft Security Corporate Vice President of Compliance, Identity, and Management Vasu Jakkal’s blog with highlights from her keynote address and insights into her vision for the Microsoft Security family of products and beyond.

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Priva.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹Volume of data/information created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide from 2010 to 2020, with forecasts from 2021 to 2025, Statista. September 8, 2022.

²Data privacy is a growing concern for more consumers, Lance Whitney. August 17, 2021.

The post How Microsoft Purview and Priva help simplify data protection appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Microsoft Purview is a portfolio of solutions for information protection, data governance, risk management, and compliance that enables organizations to effectively manage their data all from one place. It provides enhanced visibility that organizations can leverage across their environment to help close gaps that can lead to data exposure, simplify tasks through automation, stay up-to-date with regulatory requirements, and keep their most important asset—their data—secured. Partners play a critical role in helping customers manage their entire data estate. We’ve invested in connectors, APIs, and extensibility to support partners and help customers manage their data. 

Microsoft Purview product announcements

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of the new Microsoft Graph APIs for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery. With the new Microsoft Purview eDiscovery APIs, organizations can leverage automation to streamline common, repetitive workflows that require a lot of manual effort in the product experience.

Customers and partners find automation and extensibility of eDiscovery workflows critically important because of the ability to reduce the potential for human error in highly sensitive workflows. For example, efficiently managing repeatable, defensible processes is critical to managing risk for organizations that have significant requirements for litigation and investigation.

Here are some of the ways partners are building value-added solutions and services using our Microsoft Purview eDiscovery APIs:

Relativity integrates with Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Premium)

Relativity, Microsoft’s Security ISV of the Year for 2022, shared that “using the right tools to put business’s data into action is essential for many eDiscovery and compliance use cases. RelativityOne integration with Microsoft Purview eDiscovery significantly expedites the eDiscovery review process, minimizes data copies across multiple platforms, facilitates third-party collaboration, and ultimately reduces costs while the data remains secure within the Microsoft cloud. Now is the time to benefit from RelativityOne’s integration with Microsoft’s Purview’s eDiscovery platform,” said Chris Izsak, Strategic Partnerships GTM Manager, Relativity.

BDO’s Athenagy integrates with Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

BDO’s Athenagy creates dashboards using both Microsoft Purview eDiscovery and RelativityOne. Their “patent-pending business intelligence dashboards now provide legal, IT, and compliance professionals a whole new level of data transparency and cost containment by surfacing up critical insights inside both Microsoft Purview eDiscovery—using the newly released Microsoft Purview eDiscovery APIs—and RelativityOne tied to legal hold, collect, preservation, processing, and review for every investigation, compliance, and litigation matter,” said Daniel Gold, inventor of Athenagy and managing director of E-Discovery Managed Services, BDO.

Epiq Global integrates with Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Epiq leverages Microsoft Purview eDiscovery APIs to create an end-to-end eDiscovery workflow. “Utilizing the Microsoft Purview eDiscovery APIs allows us to automate within Microsoft Purview to use inputs from our customer’s existing legal hold system of record to seamlessly orchestrate an end-to-end workflow including sending hold notices, preserving data in place, and performing searches, collections, and exports. When updates are made in the system of record, the changes are propagated directly to the appropriate piece of eDiscovery to ensure parity. An automated solution eliminates human error, reduces administrative costs, and ensures that eDiscovery processes are in sync with your issuance of legal holds,” said Jon Kessler, Vice President of Information Governance Services, Epiq.

Lighthouse integrates with Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Lighthouse uses Microsoft Purview eDiscovery APIs to create “a rich and intuitive user experience, taking advantage of custodian data mapping, in-place preservation, modern attachment retrieval, and advanced culling. Our automation and orchestration solution is designed to improve user efficacy with job failure oversight, completion notification, and automatic provisioning and management of Azure storage containers. Clients embracing this solution benefit from automation and orchestration to fully leverage Purview Premium eDiscovery’s apps securely and at scale,” said John Collins, Director of Advisory Services, Lighthouse (winner of the Compliance and Privacy Trailblazer award for 2022).

Growth opportunities for partners

The opportunity for our partners who invest in the Microsoft compliance ecosystem continues to grow. Our partners are finding success by building value-added solutions and services around Microsoft’s solutions at an increasing rate. For example, partners are creating solutions that connect disparate information repositories for enterprise-wide compliance initiatives.

Microsoft partners continue to have the ability to participate in our successful go-to-market program, the partner build-intent workshops. These workshops cover the Microsoft Security portfolio and help drive customer success with Microsoft products and partner services through prescriptive scenarios that address the top pain points of our customers. These workshops have been updated to give partners the ability to uncover additional opportunities leveraging the most up-to-date tools and solutions. Discover all our partner workshops and get started with unlocking opportunities and value with your customers.

How Microsoft supports the partner ecosystem

The Microsoft Purview platform enables our customers and partners to adapt, extend, integrate, and automate information protection, data governance, risk management, and compliance scenarios. These capabilities are enabled through our investments in these key building blocks:

Microsoft Purview APIs: We are constantly expanding our API surface area. With our investments in Microsoft Graph APIs we currently enabling extensibility scenarios across Purview Information Protection, Purview Data Lifecycle Management, Purview eDiscovery, Purview Audit, and more. Partners are using these APIs to build value-added services and solve unique customer scenarios.

Microsoft Purview Data Connectors: To enable high-fidelity data ingestion—including sources such as Slack, Zoom, and WhatsApp, we have partnered with Veritas, TeleMessage, 17a-4, and CellTrust to deliver more than 70 ready-to-use connectors. Our extensibility push provides more opportunities for partners to join this connector ecosystem.

Microsoft Purview Data Catalog: Microsoft Purview’s unified data governance capabilities help with managing on-premises, multicloud, and software as a service (SaaS) data. Microsoft Purview Data Catalog supports multicloud data classification and covers data repositories such as Azure Cosmos DB and Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 buckets. There is also an Atlas Kafka API that facilitates extensibility scenarios for our partners and customers.

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager: With universal templates, we help partners and customers extend compliance management capabilities to non-Microsoft environments.

Power Automate integrations: Microsoft Purview solutions including Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management, Insider Risk Management, and Communication Compliance have built-in Power Automate integrations. This offers unique opportunities for our partners and customers to streamline and automate workflows and business scenarios.

Another way Microsoft supports the ecosystem is through the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA). MISA is an ecosystem of independent software vendors and managed service providers that have integrated their products and services with Microsoft’s security technology. Over the last year, MISA has extended its qualifying products to include a broad range of Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Priva products. MISA offers members co-marketing benefits and the opportunity to deepen their technology integrations and relationship within the Microsoft security ecosystem. MISA offers members co-marketing benefits and the opportunity to deepen their technology integrations and relationship within the Microsoft security ecosystem.

Partner with Microsoft Purview

Here are a few ways that partners can join the Microsoft Purview ecosystem:

• For more information, check out the Microsoft Purview partner transform page.
• Explore the many opportunities for the partner ecosystem with Microsoft Purview.
• Reach out to our partners and explore their solutions.
• Check out our Microsoft Security Inspire blog post to learn more about how partners can help customers on the Microsoft platform.
• Get started with unlocking opportunities and value with your customers at our Partner Network.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post How Microsoft Purview and Priva support the partner ecosystem appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

But constant connectivity brings evolving, inherent risks. Over the past two years, organizations have seen a massive increase in their digital footprint, leading to data fragmentation and growth across a multitude of applications, devices, and locations. The Great Reshuffle left blind spots within ever-enlarging data estates.¹ Dark data, which organizations pay to store, but goes underutilized in decision making, is now growing at a rate of 62 percent per year.²  Even the virtual office has created the risk of new collaboration mediums opening doors to harassment, sensitive data leaks, and other workplace policy infractions. It’s a big digital world for any organization to try to manage. 

The lines between risk roles are blurring 

Just as today’s big-data, multiplatform, hyper-connected workplace brings new vulnerabilities, the responsibility for protecting it is also in flux. For example, an organization with a Chief Data Officer (CDO), Chief Risk Officer (CRO)/Chief Compliance Officer (CCO), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), and Chief Information Officer (CIO) has to choose whether they will duplicate, compete, or collaborate. Conditions that are driving the need for integrated risk management include:

• The pandemic: Ongoing decentralized work has reinforced the need for strategic, operational, and business continuity management. All of this requires cross-functional data sharing and coordination. 
• Nation-state attacks: Increasing sophistication and frequency of nation-state attacks is driving collaboration between compliance, data, and security functions. 
• Remote work: Virtual communication spaces require coordination between compliance, IT, and HR. 
• Evolving regulations: New requirements, like those from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Department of Justice (DOJ), and the European Union Whistleblower Directive require collaboration among all risk-management leaders.
• Data sharing: Requirements for continuous access to operational data across functions (read the DOJ’s requirements for compliance programs).  
• Growing CDO responsibilities: The CDO’s role may go beyond data management and protection to include business intelligence, AI, and machine learning. Because this role can overlap with a Chief Analytics Officer (CAO) and CISO, a unified solution for risk management is vital to eliminating redundancies.
• Governance and compliance: Overlap between information governance, records management, and data collection is driving the need for a comprehensive solution for managing data risk.

The market has responded with dozens of products that force security, data governance, compliance, and legal teams to stitch together a patchwork of solutions. This approach not only strains resources, but it’s also ineffective. Security outcomes are worse—audits are failed and brand reputations are damaged.

Introducing Microsoft Purview 

To meet the challenges of today’s decentralized, data-rich workplace, we’re introducing Microsoft Purview—a comprehensive set of solutions that help you govern, protect, and manage your entire data estate. This new brand family combines the capabilities of the former Azure Purview and the Microsoft 365 Compliance portfolio that customers already rely on, providing unified data governance and risk management for your organization.

The new Microsoft Purview:

• Helps you gain visibility into assets across your entire data estate.
• Enables easy access to all your data, security, and risk solutions. 
• Helps safeguard and manage sensitive data across clouds, apps, and endpoints.
• Manages end-to-end data risks and regulatory compliance.
• Empowers your organization to govern, protect, and manage data in new, comprehensive ways. 

Microsoft Purview brings together data governance from Microsoft Data and AI, along with compliance and risk management from Microsoft Security. Microsoft Purview is also complemented by identity and access management, threat protection, cloud security, endpoint management, and privacy management capabilities—creating a truly comprehensive approach to security.

Microsoft Purview at a glance

Securing multicloud and multiplatform environments

Because organizations now operate across multiple clouds and on-premises platforms, we’ve expanded Microsoft Purview’s capabilities to include data protection for macOS users, as well as offering new data classifiers, protection for mobile devices, and data lifecycle management.

• To extend Microsoft Purview’s capabilities for macOS users, we’re excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for macOS endpoints. Now organizations can extend their endpoint DLP insights and controls to devices running macOS (Catalina or higher). In addition, the preview of restricted app groups for Windows endpoints allows organizations to scope different access restrictions to sensitive files between a set of sanctioned or unsanctioned applications. Learn about Microsoft Purview DLP for macOS endpoint.
• Before sensitive data can be safely shared, it first needs to be identified. To that end, we’re extending our sensitive information type catalog with more than 50 new classifiers. The new classifiers are available for DLP, Information Protection (auto-labeling), Data Lifecycle Management, Insider Risk Management, Records Management, eDiscovery, and Microsoft Priva. Explore the new data classifiers in Microsoft Purview.
• With remote users now regularly accessing files from multiple locations, devices, and apps, organizations shouldn’t have to compromise on security for productivity. To help address this, the preview of co-authoring of encrypted documents for mobile devices (iOS and Android) enables multiple users to work simultaneously on Microsoft 365 apps and documents with autosave, allowing for enhanced real-time collaboration and productivity. Learn about co-authoring of encrypted documents.
• Within any document file’s lifecycle, organizations need to be able to configure retention and deletion settings. To help simplify that process, we’re announcing the preview of multi-stage retention in Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management (formerly Microsoft Information Governance), which automatically applies a new label when an item reaches the end of its retention period. Learn more about multi-stage retention from Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management.

Protecting your business and employees in a hybrid work environment

Employees don’t gather around the water cooler anymore. They’re communicating across digital channels and personal and corporate devices. Microsoft Purview helps protect your organization’s data with Insider Risk Management, eDiscovery, Communication Compliance, and more.

• Many organizations have had to adapt to a changing workforce during the Great Reshuffle. Recent enhancements to the detection and investigation capabilities of Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management help provide security teams with additional context and actionable insights to keep data secure, including expanded coverage with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. Learn about Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management.
• Sensitive data isn’t confined to business transactions. According to the 2022 Work Trend Index annual report from Microsoft, employees are communicating over a greater variety of digital channels. With so much internal chatter, robust data and document discovery are essential for organizations responding to both internal investigations and external inquiries. To help meet that need, we’re excited to announce additional capabilities for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Premium), which improve the identification of relevant data in Microsoft Teams and help manage legal holds with new reporting functionality. Learn about Microsoft Purview eDiscovery.
• To help organizations maintain a positive work culture and a strong commitment to user privacy, Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance helps detect code of conduct violations (including harassing or threatening language, adult content, and sharing sensitive information). We’re excited to announce new features, including expanded optical character recognition, machine learning model highlighting, reduced detection-to-investigation time, and step-by-step onboarding guidance. Protect your employees and business with Microsoft Purview Communications Compliance.
• To help organizations save time and manual efforts, we’re excited to announce the general availability of continuous compliance assessments in Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager. This feature allows customers to understand and act on over 150 recommendations across our suite of solutions—increasing customers’ ability to measure and manage their data handling from a single location. Learn more about continuous assessments in Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager.

Enhancing data governance across compliance and privacy imperatives

Microsoft Priva complements Microsoft Purview’s data governance and compliance portfolio. Acting as a separately available privacy management solution that proactively identifies and helps protect against privacy risks, Priva provides visibility into organizations’ privacy postures. This includes associated privacy risks arising from personal data transfers, overexposure, and hoarding. Priva’s policy-driven templates also help customers adhere to common privacy regulations and requirements.

At the same time, Priva provides the flexibility to customize policies for user groups, data locations, conditions, and notifications. As the foundation of enterprise privacy management, Priva automatically recommends risk-remediation actions and subject rights requests at scale—offering built-in review and redact capabilities and integration with business processes and APIs.

We protect data to protect people 

Regulations regarding data governance don’t exist in a vacuum. Their purpose is to help create a more ethical digital world. A strong solution is built around strong principles. It’s designed to protect customers’ data, keep employees’ workplaces safe, and protect the business. At Microsoft, we don’t do these things just because they’re required, we do them because they’re right.   

There’s no going back to the days of perimeter-based security. Enabling an effective Zero Trust approach requires the ability to govern, protect, and understand data coming from an ever-widening array of endpoints. Similarly, the number of tools we use for work will also grow. And with it, the challenge of having to protect data and manage risk across a multicloud and multiplatform environment. 

The unification of Microsoft’s data governance and compliance capabilities to Microsoft Purview reflects our belief that the world needs a simpler and more unified approach to data. We want to help you get the most out of your data while simultaneously managing risk and compliance. If you’re already a Microsoft 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance customer, head over to the revamped Microsoft Purview compliance portal to check out some of these changes. If you’re an existing Azure Purview customer, visit the new Microsoft Purview governance portal. To learn more and get started, visit the Microsoft Purview website or start a free trial today.

Join other cybersecurity professionals at the Microsoft Security Summit digital event on May 12, 2022. Hear exciting product announcements and discover solutions you can use to lay the foundation for a safer and more innovative future. Register now.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹How Microsoft can help reduce insider risk during the Great Reshuffle, Alym Rayani, Microsoft Security. February 28, 2022.

²Shed light on your dark data before GDPR comes into force, CIO, April 2018.

³September 2021 survey of 512 US compliance decision-makers commissioned by Microsoft from Vital Findings.

⁴February 2022 survey of 200 US compliance decision-makers (n=100 599-999 employees, n=100 1000+ employees) commissioned by Microsoft with MDC Research.

The post The future of compliance and data governance is here: Introducing Microsoft Purview appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

As the number and scope of privacy standards have proliferated, privacy becomes an expectation of customers and stakeholders to enable a trusted business. Many of the large organizations I work with are mature in their privacy compliance processes. Some have had to be GDPR compliant since 2018. Even those without GDPR compliance obligations saw GDPR as a watershed event, recognizing that broader privacy regulation was coming. Organizations have now shifted their focus from privacy compliance to privacy leadership in order to provide value to their customers and their brands. To assist organizations on their privacy journey, we introduced Microsoft Priva in October 2021 to help customers safeguard personal data and respect privacy rights.

The concept of respecting an individual’s privacy rights has been emphasized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as “The Individual Participation Principle” in the Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs) since 1980.² The principle includes an individual’s right to access and control their own data. In some cases, they have the right to have this data corrected or deleted. Since GDPR went into effect, the concept has become more mainstream, known as data subject requests or subject rights requests. In the United States, 12 states have laws passed or active bills that mandate a subject’s right to data access.³

Subject rights requests (SRRs) management is time-consuming and costly

Responding to subject rights requests (SRRs) can be resource-intensive, costly, and difficult to manage. There are challenging time frames for a response, with GDPR mandating a response time of 30 days and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) allowing 45 days. More than half of organizations handle SRRs manually, while one in three has automated the process.⁴ According to Gartner®, most organizations process between 51 and 100 SRRs per month at a cost of more than USD1,500 per request.⁵ As more privacy regulations come into force and the public becomes more informed about their rights, the volume of SRRs is expected to grow substantially, impacting organizations’ resources even further.

Figure 1. Approximately one in three organizations have partially automated subject rights requests.

Scaling SRR management is challenging

To process an SRR, an organization must verify the data subject to make sure that the individual is who they say they are and has the rights to the information, then collect the information, review, redact where appropriate, and provide the response to the requester in an auditable manner.

Most organizations have processes in place for SRR responses but rely on email for collaboration, eDiscovery tools for search, and manual reviews to identify data conflicts like a file containing multiple people’s privacy relevant data. These processes can work but they don’t scale. They also create data sprawl and additional security and compliance risk.

Manage at scale and respond with confidence with Microsoft Priva

To help organizations deal with these challenges, Microsoft has created Microsoft Priva, a privacy management solution that helps safeguard and respect privacy while streamlining the process for responding to SRRs.

Microsoft Priva SRRs helps gather a subject’s data from the Microsoft 365 environment automatically, including emails, messages, documents, spreadsheets, and more that contain the requestor’s personal data. It then detects and flags conflicts like the personal data of others or confidential information included in the collected files. Automated data collection and detection can help you capture conflicts more accurately to avoid any data leakage.

Additionally, the solution allows collaboration in a protected platform for stakeholders to review, triage, and redact collected files in their native views. Unlike other solutions that might only provide you with a report of file paths, Microsoft Priva can bring the files to you and save you time and effort manually copying and pasting the file paths in your browser, or emailing and messaging files to others to review.

Figure 2. Review, triage, and redact collected files in their native views when multiple people’s data is detected.

Privacy admins can also leverage Microsoft Teams and Power Automate, integrated with the Microsoft Priva solution, to work with HR, legal, and other departments in an efficient, compliant, and auditable way. All your collaboration data is centralized in one platform that ensures security and compliance along the way. Microsoft Priva SRRs helps organizations manage SRRs at scale with confidence while avoiding personal data sprawl.

Figure 3. Microsoft Priva SRRs helps manage requests at scale and with confidence.

The solution dashboard provides visualization of SRR metrics and the ability to filter and manage requests to completion. This establishes to internal stakeholders and regulators that SRR responses were made with compliant processes in the required timeframe. 

Figure 4: Microsoft Priva SRRs helps provide insights on SRR progress and show trends over time.

Integrate with your privacy solutions

Many organizations are using other tools to manage SRRs. We want to bring the value of Microsoft Priva and its native integration with Microsoft 365 to them as well to provide a better-together solution. Part of this is to integrate Microsoft Priva with the solutions of other software vendors and customers’ homegrown solutions through our Microsoft Graph subject rights request API. The API allows integration with privacy independent software vendors (ISVs), like OneTrust, Securiti.ai, and WireWheel, to automate the SRR handling process and provide a response that encompasses the organization’s entire data estate.

For example, an organization can use the API to send a request they received in their homegrown application to Microsoft Priva, which then collects the subject’s personal data automatically, enables collaboration to review and redact files, creates a link to the data package, and sends it back to the homegrown application through the API. The organization then can combine all the reports and data from various environments together to respond to the requestor.

Figure 5. Microsoft Graph API enables organizations to leverage Microsoft Priva along with their existing privacy tools.

Learn more

We are excited to help ease the complexity of SRR management. To learn more about how to manage SRRs at scale, download the e-book Five tips from Microsoft to automate your SRRs or join our webinar on April 19, 2022.

Microsoft Priva solutions are generally available for customers as an add-on to all Microsoft 365 or Office 365 enterprise subscriptions. You can try out Microsoft Priva SRRs for 90 days or create up to 50 subject rights requests (whichever limit expires first) at no cost.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹UNCTAD Data Protection and Privacy Legislation Worldwide

²OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data, OECD. 2013.

³US State Privacy Legislation Tracker, Taylor Kay Lively, iapp. March 3, 2022.

⁴IAPP-EY Consulting and Annual Privacy Governance Report for 2021, iapp, EY. 2021.

⁵Market Guide for Subject Rights Request Automation, Gartner. November 2021.

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