The Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview teams are excited to be in Las Vegas from March 31 to April 2, 2025, for the second annual and highly anticipated Microsoft Fabric Community Conference. With more than 200 sessions, 13 focused tracks, 21 hands-on workshops, and two keynotes, attendees can expect an engaging and informative experience. The conference offers a unique opportunity for the community to connect and exchange insights on key topics such as data and AI.

AI innovation is impacting every industry, business process, and individual. About 75% of knowledge workers today are currently using some sort of AI in their day to day.¹ At the same time, the regulatory landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Around the world, at least 69 countries have proposed more than 1,000 AI-related policy initiatives and legal frameworks to address public concerns around AI safety and governance.² With the need to adhere to regulations and policy frameworks for AI transformation, a comprehensive solution is needed to address security, governance, and privacy concerns. Additionally, with the convergence of the responsibilities of cybersecurity and data teams, customers are asking for a solution that turns data security and data governance into a team sport to address issues such data discovery, data classification, data loss prevention, and data quality in a unified way. Microsoft Purview delivers a comprehensive set of solutions that address these needs, helping customers seamlessly secure and confidently activate their data in the era of AI.

We are excited to announce new innovations that help security and data teams accelerate their organization’s AI transformation:

1. Enhancing Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (Purview DLP) support for lakehouse in Microsoft Fabric to help prevent sensitive data loss by restricting access.
2. Expanding Purview DLP policy support for additional Fabric items such as KQL databases and Mirrored databases to send users notification through policy tips when they are working with sensitive data.
3. Microsoft Purview integration with Copilot in Fabric, specifically for Power BI.
4. Data Observability within the Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog.

Seamlessly secure data

Microsoft Purview is extending its proven data security value delivered to millions of Microsoft 365 users worldwide, to the Microsoft data platform. This helps users drive consistency across their multicloud and multiplatform data estate and simplify risks related to data leaks, oversharing, and risky user behavior as more users are managing and handling data in the era of AI.

1. Enhancing Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) support for lakehouse in Fabric to help prevent sensitive data loss by restricting access

Microsoft Purview Data Security capabilities are used by hundreds of thousands of customers for their integration with Microsoft 365 data. Since last year’s Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, Microsoft Purview has extended Microsoft Purview Information Protection and Purview DLP policy tip value across the data estate, including Fabric. Currently, Purview DLP supports the ability to show users notifications for when they are working with sensitive data in lakehouse. We are excited to share that we are enhancing the DLP value in lakehouse to prevent sensitive data leakage to guest users by restricting access. Data Security admins can configure policies and limit access to only internal users or data owners based on the sensitive data found. This control is valuable for when a Fabric tenant includes guest users and domain owners want to limit access to internal proprietary data in their lakehouses. 

Figure 1. DLP policy restricting access for guest users into lakehouse due to personally identifiable information (PII) data discovered 

2. Expanding DLP policy support for additional Fabric items such as KQL databases and Mirrored databases to show users notification through policy tips when they are working with sensitive data

A key part of securing sensitive data is to provide visibility to your users on where and how they are interacting with sensitive data. Purview DLP policies can help notify users when they are working with sensitive data through policy tips in lakehouse in Fabric. We are excited to announce that we are extending policy tips support for additional Fabric items—KQL databases and Mirrored databases in preview. (Mirrored Database sources include Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure Databricks Unity Catalog, and Snowflake, with more sources available soon). KQL databases are the only databases used for real-time analytics so detecting sensitive data that comes through real-time analytics is huge for Fabric customers. Purview DLP for Mirrored databases reduces the security risk of sensitive data leakage when data is transferred in Fabric. We are happy to extend Purview DLP value to more data sources, providing end-to-end protection for customers within their Fabric environments, all to prepare for the safe deployment of AI.

Figure 2. Policy tip triggered by Purview DLP due to PII being discovered in KQL databases.

Figure 3. Policy tip triggered by Purview DLP due to PII being discovered in Mirrored databases.

3. Microsoft Purview for Copilot in Fabric

As organizations adopt AI, implementing data controls and a Zero Trust approach is crucial to mitigate risks like data oversharing and leakage, and potential non-compliant usage in AI. We are excited to announce Microsoft Purview capabilities in preview for Copilot in Fabric, starting with Copilot for Power BI. By combining Microsoft Purview and Copilot for Power BI, users can:

• Discover data risks such as sensitive data in user prompts and responses and receive recommended actions in their Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) dashboard to reduce these risks.
• Identify risky AI usage with Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management to investigate risky AI usage, such as an inadvertent user who has neglected security best practices and shared sensitive data in AI or a departing employee using AI to find sensitive data and exfiltrating the data through a USB device.
• Govern AI usage with Microsoft Purview Audit, Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, retention policies, and non-compliant usage detection.

Figure 4. Purview DSPM for AI provides admins with comprehensive reports on Copilot in Fabric’s user activities, as well as data entered and shared within the copilot.

Confidently activate data

4. Data observability, now in preview, within Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog

Within the Unified Catalog in Microsoft Purview, users can easily identify the root cause of data quality issues by visually investigating the relationship between governance domains, data products, glossary terms, and data assets associated with them through its lineage. Data assets and their respective data quality are visible across your multicloud, hybrid data estate. Maintaining high data quality is core to driving trustworthy AI innovation forward, and with the new data observability capabilities in Microsoft Purview, users can now improve how fast they can investigate and resolve root cause issues to improve data quality and respond to regulatory reporting requirements.

Figure 5. Lineage view of data assets that showcases data quality within a Data Product.

Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric can help secure and activate data

As your organization continues to implement AI, Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview will serve as key solutions to safely activate your data for AI. Stay tuned for even more exciting innovations to come and check out the Fabric blog to read more about the innovations in Fabric.

Learn more

Explore these resources to stay updated on our product innovations in security and governance for your data:

• Learn how to secure and govern your entire data estate with Microsoft Purview.
• Learn more about Microsoft Purview Data Governance.
• Get started with Microsoft Fabric.

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.

¹Work Trends Index

²AI Regulations around the World – 2025

The post New innovations in Microsoft Purview for protected, AI-ready data appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

I’m often asked how long it takes to deploy Microsoft Purview. The answer depends on the specifics of the organization and what they want to achieve. Microsoft Purview should enable a comprehensive data governance program but it can provide risk mitigation for generative AI in the short term while the program is underway.

Microsoft Purview

Secure and govern your entire data estate.

Explore solutions

Organizations need AI solutions to add value for their customers and to stay competitive. They can’t wait for years to secure and govern these systems.

For the organizations deploying generative AI, “how long does it take to deploy Microsoft Purview?” isn’t the right question.

The risk mitigation Microsoft Purview provides for AI can begin on day one. This includes Microsoft AI, like Microsoft 365 Copilot, AI that an organization builds in-house, and AI from third parties like Google Gemini or ChatGPT.

This post will discuss ways we can secure and govern data used or generated by AI quickly, with minimal user impact, change management, and resources required.

These Microsoft Purview solutions are:

• Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management for AI
• Microsoft Purview Information Protection
• Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention
• Microsoft Purview Communications Compliance
• Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management
• Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management
• Microsoft Purview Audit and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery
• Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager

Here are short term steps you can take while the comprehensive data governance program is underway.

Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management for AI

Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management for AI (DSPM for AI) provides visibility into data security risks. It reports on:

• User’s interactions with AI.
• Sensitive information in the prompts users share with the AI.
• Whether the sensitive information users share is labeled and thus is protected by durable security policy controls.
• Whether and how user interactions may be violating company policy including codes of conduct and attempts at jailbreak, where users manipulate the system to circumvent protections.
• The risk level of users interacting with the system, such as inadvertent or malicious activities they may be involved in that put the organization at risk.

DSPM for AI reports on this for each AI application and can drill down from the reports to the individual user activities. DSPM for AI collects and surfaces insights from the other Microsoft Purview solutions around generative AI risks in a single screen.

Custom sensitive information types, sensitivity labels, and information protection rules are reasoned over by DSPM for AI, but if these are not available, more than 300 out-of-the-box sensitive information types are available from day one.  

DSPM for AI will use these to report on risk for the organization without additional configuration. The organization’s administrators can configure policy to mitigate these risks directly from the DSPM for AI tool.

Figure 1. DSPM for AI shows interactions with Microsoft 365 Copilot, enterprise generative AI from other providers, and AI developed in-house.

Figure 2. DSPM for AI Reports on generative AI user interactions with sensitive data.

A big concern that organizations have in widely deploying generative AI is that it will return results that contain sensitive information that the user should not have access to. SharePoint sites have been created over the years, are unlabeled, and may be accessible to the entire organization through the AI. The “security by obscurity” that may have prevented the sensitive information from being inappropriately shared is now negated by the AI that reasons over and returns the data.

Data assessments, part of DSPM for AI, and currently in preview, identifies potential oversharing risks and allows the administrator to apply a sensitivity label to the SharePoint sites, the sensitive data, or initiate an Microsoft Entra ID user access review to manage group memberships.

The administrator can engage the business stakeholder who has knowledge of the risk posed by the data and invite them to mitigate the risk or apply the policy at scale from the Microsoft Purview administration portal.

Figure 3. Data assessment—visualize risk, review access, and deploy policy.

Microsoft Purview Information Protection

The document access controls of Microsoft Purview Information Protection, including sensitivity labels, are enforced when the data is reasoned over by AI. The user is given visibility in context that they are working with sensitive information. This awareness empowers users to protect the organization. 

The sensitivity labels that enforce scoped encryption, watermarking, and other protections travel with the document as the user interacts with the AI. When the AI creates new content based on the document, the new content inherits the most restrictive label and policy.

Microsoft Purview can automatically apply sensitivity labels to AI interactions based on the organization’s existing policy for email, desktop applications, and Microsoft Teams, or new policy can be deployed for the AI.

These can be based on out-of-the-box sensitive information types for a quick start.

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

The Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention policies that the organization currently uses for email, desktop applications, and Teams can be extended to the AI or new policy for the AI can be created. Cut and paste of sensitive information or transfer of a labeled document into the AI can be prevented or only allowed with an auditable justification from the user.

A rule can be configured to prevent all documents bearing a specific label from being reasoned over by the AI. Out-of-the-box sensitive information types can be used for a quick start.

Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance

Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance provides the ability to detect regulatory compliance (for example, SEC or FINRA) and business conduct violations such as sensitive or confidential information, harassing or threatening language, and sharing of adult content.

Out-of-the-box policies can be used to monitor user prompts or AI-generated content. It provides policy enforcement in near real time and also audit logs and reporting.

Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management

Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management correlates signal to identify potential malicious or accidental behaviors from legitimate users. Pre-configured generative AI-specific risk detections and policy templates are now available in preview.

As the Insider Risk Management solution algorithms determine a user to be engaging in risky behavior, the data loss prevention (DLP) policies for that user can be made stricter using a feature called Adaptive Protection. It can be configured with out-of-the-box policies. This continuous monitoring and policy modulation mitigates risk while reducing administrator workload.

AI analytics can be activated from the Microsoft Purview portal to provide insights even before the Insider Risk Management solution is deployed to users. This quickly surfaces AI risks with minimal administrative workload.

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management

Microsoft Purview can enforce AI Data Lifecycle Management, with retention of AI prompts, prompt returns, and the documents AI creates for a specified time period. This can be done globally for every interaction with an AI solution. It can be done with out-of-the-box or custom policies. This will keep these interactions available for future investigations, for regulatory compliance, or to tune policies and inform the governance program.

A policy for deletion of AI interactions can be enforced so information is not over-retained.

Microsoft Purview Audit and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

The organization will need to support internal investigations around the use of AI. Microsoft Purview Audit logs and retains these interactions. They also need to support their legal team should they have to produce AI interactions to support litigation.

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery can put a user’s interactions with the AI as well as their other Microsoft 365 documents and communications on hold so that their availability to support investigations is maintained. It allows them to be searched based metadata, enhancing relevancy, annotated, and produced.

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager has pre-built assessments for AI regulations including:

• EU Artificial Intelligence Act.
• ISO/IEC 23894:2023.
• ISO/IEC 42001:2023.
• NIST AI Risk Management Framework (RMF) 1.0.

These assessments are available to benchmark compliance over time, report on control status, and maintain and produce evidence for both Microsoft and the organization’s activities that support the regulatory compliance program.

Microsoft Purview is an AI enabler

Without security, governance, and compliance bases being covered, the AI program puts the organization at risk. An AI program can be blocked before it deploys if the team can’t demonstrate how it is mitigating these risks.

The actions suggested here can all be taken quickly, and with limited effort, to set up a generative AI deployment for success.

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft Purview.

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.

The post Fast-track generative AI security with Microsoft Purview appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Historically, organizations have relied on the traditional approach to data security and governance, largely involving stitching together fragmented solutions. According to Gartner®, “75% of security leaders are actively pursuing a security vendor consolidation strategy as of 2022.”² Consolidation, however, is no easy feat. In a recent study, more than 95% of security leaders acknowledge that unifying the handling of data security, compliance, and privacy across teams and tools is both a priority and a challenge.³ These approaches often fall short because of duplicate data, redundant alerts, and siloed investigations, ultimately leading to increased data risks. Over time, this approach has been increasingly difficult for organizations to maintain.

Unify how you protect and govern your data with Microsoft Purview

Unlike traditional data security and governance strategies that require disparate solutions to achieve comprehensive data protection, Microsoft Purview is purpose-built to unify data security, governance, and compliance into a single platform experience. This integration aims to reduce complexity, simplify management, and mitigate risk, while helping enhance efficiency across teams to support a culture of collaboration. With Microsoft Purview you can:

• Enable comprehensive data protection.
• Support compliance and regulatory requirements.
• Help safeguard AI Innovation.

What’s new in Microsoft Purview?

To meet our growing customer needs, the team has been delivering a lot of innovation at a rapid pace. In this blog, we’re excited to recap all the new capabilities we announced at Microsoft Ignite last month.

Enable comprehensive data protection

Microsoft Purview enables you to discover, secure, and govern data across Microsoft and third-party sources. Today, Microsoft Purview delivers rich data security capabilities through Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention, Microsoft Purview Information Protection, and Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management, enhanced with AI-powered Adaptive Protection. To drive AI transformation, you need to build and maintain a strong data foundation, categorized by data that is not just secured but also governed. Microsoft Purview also addresses your data governance needs with the newly reimagined Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog. These data security and data governance products leverage shared capabilities such as a common data catalog, connectors, classifications, and audit logs—helping reduce inconsistencies, inefficiencies, and exposure gaps, commonly experienced by using disparate tools.

Introducing Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management

Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) provides visibility into data security risks and recommends controls to protect that data. DSPM provides contextual insights, usage analysis, and continuous risk assessments of your data, helping you mitigate risks and enhance data security. With DSPM, you get a shared understanding of key risks through a series of reports that correlate insights across location and type of sensitive data, risky user activities, and common exfiltration channels. In addition, DSPM provides actionable, scenario-based recommendations for detection and protection policies. For example, DSPM can help you create an Insider Risk Management policy that identifies risky behavior such as downgrading labels in documents followed by exfiltration, and a data loss prevention (DLP) policy to block that exfiltration at the same time.

DSPM also brings a view of historical trends and insights based on sensitivity labels applied, sensitive assets covered by at least one DLP policy, and potentially risky users so show the effectiveness of your data security policies over time. And finally, DSPM leverages the power of generative AI through its deep integration with Microsoft Security Copilot. With this integration, you can easily uncover risks that might not be immediately apparent and drive efficient and richer investigations—all in natural language.

With DSPM, you can easily identify possible labeling and policy gaps such as unlabeled content and users that aren’t scoped in a DLP policy, unusual patterns and activities that might indicate potential risks, as well as opportunities to adapt and strengthen your data security program.

Figure 1. DSPM overview page provides centralized visibility across data, users, and activities, as well as access to reports.

Learn more about this announcement in the Data Security Posture Management blog.

Increasing data security and security operations center integration

Understanding data and user context is vital for improving security operations and prioritizing investigations, especially when sensitive data is at stake. By integrating insights such as data classification, access controls, and user activity into the security operations center (SOC) experience, organizations can better assess the impact of security incidents, reduce false alerts, and enhance containment efforts. In addition to the already present DLP alerts in the Microsoft Defender XDR incident investigation and data security remediation actions enabled directly from Defender XDR, we’ve also added Insider Risk Management context to the user entity page to provide a more comprehensive view of user activities.

With Microsoft Purview’s latest integration with Microsoft Defender, now in preview, you get insider risk alerts in Defender XDR and can correlate them with incidents. This gives you critical user context for your security investigations. SOC teams can now better distinguish internal incidents from external cyberattacks and refine their response strategies. For more complex analysis to identify risks such as attack patterns, we are integrating insider risk signals into Defender XDR’s Advanced Hunting, giving you deeper insights and allowing you to improve your policies in partnership with data security teams. Together, these advancements allow your organization to stay ahead of evolving cyberthreats, providing a collaborative and data-driven approach to security.

Learn more about this announcement in the Purview Insider Risk Management blog.

Protecting data and preventing sensitive data loss

As AI generates new data in unprecedented volumes, the need to secure that data and prevent the loss of sensitive information has become even more crucial. Our new DLP capabilities help you effectively investigate DLP incidents, fortify existing protections, and refine your overall DLP program. You can now customize Purview DLP to the established processes of your organization with the Microsoft Power Automate connector in preview. This lets you automate and customize your DLP policy actions through Power Automate workflows to integrate your DLP incidents into new or established IT, security, and business operations workflows, like stakeholder awareness or incident remediation.

DLP policy insights in Security Copilot, also in preview, summarize existing DLP policies in natural language and helps you understand any gaps in policy coverage across your environment. This makes it easier for you to quickly and easily understand the full breadth of DLP policy coverage across your organization and address gaps in protection. We are also enhancing DLP protections on endpoints by expanding our file type coverage from more than 40 to more than 110 file types. Users can also now store and view full files on Windows devices as evidence for forensic investigations using Microsoft-managed storage. With the Microsoft-managed option, your admins can save time otherwise spent configuring additional settings, assigning permissions, and selecting the storage in the policy workflow. Finally, you can now enforce blanket protections on file types that cannot currently be scanned or classified by endpoint DLP, such as blocking copy to removable media for all computer-aided design (CAD) files regardless of those files’ contents. This helps ensure that the diverse range of file types found in your environment are still protected even if they cannot currently be scanned and classified by Microsoft Purview endpoint DLP. 

Learn more about these announcements in our Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention blog.

Microsoft Purview Data Governance innovations to drive greater business value

Research indicates that data practitioners spend 80% of their time finding, cleaning, and organizing data, leaving only 20% of time to process and analyze it.⁴ To simplify the data governance practice in the age of AI, the Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog is a comprehensive enterprise catalog that automatically inventories and tags your organization’s critical data assets. This gives your business users the ability to search for specific business data when building analytics reports or AI models. The Unified Catalog gives you visibility and confidence in your data across your disparate data sources and local catalogs with built-in data quality management and end-to-end lineage. You can integrate metadata from diverse catalogs such as Fabric OneLake, Databricks Unity, and Snowflake Polaris, into a unified catalog for all your data stewards, data owners, and business users.

Now in preview, Unified Catalog provides deeper data quality through a new scan engine that supports open standard file and table formats for big data platforms, including Microsoft Fabric, Databricks Unity Catalog, Snowflake, Google Big Query, and Amazon S3. This new scan engine enables rich data quality management at the asset level for improved data quality management at the asset level for overall improved data quality health. Lastly, Microsoft Purview Analytics in OneLake (preview) allows you to extract tenant-specific metadata from the Unified Catalog and export it directly into OneLake. You can then use Microsoft Power BI to analyze the metadata to further understand and report on your data’s quality and lineage.

Learn more about these announcements in our Microsoft Purview Data Governance blog.

Support compliance and regulatory requirements

As regulatory requirements evolve with the proliferation of AI, it is more critical than ever for businesses to keep compliance and privacy top of mind. However, adhering to requirements is becoming increasingly complex, while consequences for non-compliance are growing more severe. Microsoft Purview empowers you to address regulatory demands and comply with corporate policies by offering compliance and privacy controls that are both scalable and adaptable to changing needs.

New templates in Compliance Manager to help simplify compliance

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager provides insights into your organization’s compliance status through compliance templates and provides suggested actions and next steps to help you along your compliance journey. Compliance Manager continues to add new templates to help you address new and evolving regulations, including templates for the European Union AI Act (EUAI Act), NIST 2 AI, ISO 42001, ISO 23894, Digital Operations Resiliency Act (DORA), and additional industry and regional regulations. Compliance Manager now includes historical records that help track your organization’s compliance and provides actionable next steps to understand how new regulations or policies affect your compliance score over time. In addition, you can now leverage custom templates to address both regulatory and your organization’s specific policies and preferences.

Figure 2. EUAI Act Assessment in Compliance Manager.

Learn more about this announcement in the Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager blog.

New Microsoft Purview controls for ChatGPT Enterprise with integration with OpenAI for improved compliance

Microsoft Purview now integrates with ChatGPT Enterprise, allowing you to gain visibility and govern the prompts and responses of your ChatGPT Enterprise interactions. This integration, currently in preview, includes Microsoft Purview Audit for auditing ChatGPT Enterprise interactions, Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management for enabling retention and deletion policies, Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance to proactively detect regulatory and corporate policy violations, and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery to streamline legal investigations.

Learn more about all these announcements in our Security for AI blog.   

Microsoft Purview is built to help safeguard AI Innovation

With the rapid adoption of AI, new vulnerabilities have emerged, highlighting the need for strong data security and governance of AI workloads. Microsoft Purview is built to secure and govern data related to pre-built and custom-built AI apps.

Introducing Microsoft Data Security Posture Management for AI (DSPM for AI)

Security teams often find themselves in the dark when it comes to data security and compliance risks associated with AI usage. Without proper visibility, organizations often struggle to safeguard their AI assets effectively. DSPM for AI, now generally available, gives you visibility through a centralized dashboard and reports, enables you to proactively discover and manage your AI-related data risks, such as sensitive data in user prompts, and gives you actionable recommendations and real-time insights to respond effectively to security incidents.

Microsoft Purview controls for Microsoft 365 Copilot help prevent data oversharing

Data oversharing occurs when users have access to more data than necessary for their job duties. Organizations need effective data security controls to help mitigate this risk. At Microsoft Ignite we announced a number of new Microsoft Purview capabilities in preview to prevent data oversharing in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Data oversharing assessments: Discover data that is at risk of oversharing by scanning files containing sensitive data, identifying risky data sources such as SharePoint sites with overly permissive user access, and by providing recommendations such as auto-labeling policies and default labels to prevent sensitive data from being overshared. The oversharing assessment report can identify unlabeled files accessed by users before deploying Copilot or can be run post-deployment to identify sensitive data referenced in Copilot responses. 

Label-based permissions: Microsoft 365 Copilot honors permissions based on sensitivity labels assigned by Microsoft Purview when referencing sensitive documents.

Purview DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot: You can create DLP policies to exclude documents with specified sensitivity labels from being processed, summarized, or used in responses in Microsoft 365 Copilot, preventing sensitive data from being inadvertently overshared.

New Microsoft Purview capabilities to detect risky activities in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Security teams need ways to detect risky use of AI applications like deliberate or accidental access to sensitive data, jailbreaks, and copyright violations. Insider Risk Management and Communication Compliance now provide risky AI usage indicators, a policy template, and an analytics report in preview to help detect and investigate the risky use of AI. These new capabilities not only help detect risky activities and prompts but also integrate with Microsoft Defender XDR, enabling your security teams to investigate new AI-related risks holistically alongside other risks, such as identity risks through Microsoft Entra and data oversharing and data loss risks through Purview DLP.

New Microsoft Purview capabilities for agents built with Microsoft Copilot Studio

When new and citizen developers are building low code or no-code AI, they often lack security expertise and tools to enable security and compliance controls. Microsoft Purview now provides data controls for agents built in Copilot Studio to enable low code and no-code developers to build more secure agents. For example, when an agent built with Copilot Studio accesses sensitive data, it will recognize and honor the sensitivity labels of the data being accessed. Microsoft Purview will also protect sensitive data generated by the agent through label inheritance and will enforce label permissions, ensuring only authorized users have access.

Data security admins also get visibility into the sensitivity of data in user prompts and agent responses within DSPM for AI. Moreover, Microsoft Purview will enable you to detect anomalous user activity and risky or non-compliant AI use and apply retention or deletion policies on your agent prompts and responses. These new controls give you visibility and and insights into risks for your agents built with Copilot Studio, strengthening your data security posture.

Learn more about all these announcements in our Security for AI blog.   

Unified solutions that empower your organization

As you navigate the complexities of AI proliferation, regulatory requirements, and security threats, we are excited to innovate, invest in, and expand the capabilities of Microsoft Purview to address your most pressing data security, governance, and compliance challenges.

Get started with Microsoft Purview today

To get started, we invite you to try Microsoft Purview free and to learn more about Microsoft Purview today.

• Read the Data Security Index report.
• Read our new whitepaper: Accelerating AI transformation by prioritizing security, a path to implementing effective security for AI that enables innovation.
• Watch Microsoft Purview sessions from Microsoft Ignite.
• Try Microsoft Purview for free.

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.

¹Microsoft internal research, May 2023. 

²Gartner, Innovation Insight for Security Platforms, Peter Firstbrook, Craig Lawson. October 16, 2024. 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. 

³Microsoft internal research, August 2024. 

⁴Overcoming the 80/20 Rule in Data Science, Pragmatic Institute.

The post New Microsoft Purview features help protect and govern your data in the era of AI appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

The Microsoft Purview team and I are thrilled to showcase the latest innovations in Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric, designed to help customers secure, govern, and manage their complex data estates in the AI era. We’re excited to announce the preview of Microsoft Purview Information Protection, which allows for content restriction in Fabric using sensitivity labels, and Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention policies for lakehouses. Additionally, we’re highlighting the recent general availability of the Microsoft Purview Data Governance solution.

Customers are asking for a seamless solution that turns data security, governance, and compliance into a team sport to effectively address the converging trends across 1. scale and sophistication of data threats; 2. increasing regulations; 3. ever-expanding data estate; and 4. acceleration of AI adoption within the business.

Microsoft Purview delivers a comprehensive set of solutions that can help your organization secure, govern, and manage data for compliance and regulatory needs, wherever it lives. As we engage with customers at the Fabric Conference this week, we underscore the pivotal role of security and governance in laying the groundwork for responsible analytics. For businesses all over the world, this comprehensive approach balances the need to secure and protect data from cyberthreats with the need to activate data for business insights and AI.

Integrated with Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric are committed to delivering a rich integrated experience so customers can seamlessly secure and govern their data estate efficiently to help meet regulatory, compliance, and privacy requirements while ensuring high-quality data for data activation. For Fabric customers, this means you can discover, secure, govern, and manage Fabric items from within Microsoft Purview as a single pane of glass across your heterogeneous data estate.

Microsoft Purview helps you seamlessly discover data assets in OneLake, extend the same Microsoft Purview data security sensitivity labels and policies from Microsoft 365 to Fabric items, and curate your Fabric data assets into a single enterprise data catalog along with other data sources like Azure Databricks, Snowflake, and Google Big Query. And this seamless integration doesn’t require any data movement or duplication, helping you reduce data sprawl and silos.

Seamlessly secure your data

Microsoft Purview Data Security capabilities are already loved and leveraged by customers around the world for their Microsoft 365 data, and with today’s announcements, we are extending this value further to Microsoft Fabric customers. These added investments enhance the Microsoft Purview Data Security capabilities already available for Fabric released in March.

Now in preview, Microsoft Purview Information Protection now includes the ability to restrict access to content based on sensitivity labels for Fabric data, which helps you discover, classify, and protect sensitive information, including the ability to apply sensitivity labels. By extending the sensitivity label support to Fabric data, security admins can now use sensitivity labels to manage who has access to Fabric items with certain labels. For example, a security admin could restrict access to data items with a “financial data” sensitivity label to only users in the finance department.

We are also extending support for Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (Purview DLP) policies for your Fabric items. Purview DLP helps an organization protect sensitive data and reduce the risk of data oversharing by letting organizations define and apply policies. With these new integrations, security admins can now apply Purview DLP policies to Fabric data. As an example, a policy can be set to help detect the upload of sensitive data, like social security numbers to a lakehouse in Fabric. If detected, the policy will trigger an automatic audit activity, which can alert the security admin, and can also surface a custom policy tip to data owners to take action and remedy the non-compliance with the policy.

Learn more about Microsoft Purview Data Security integrations in Fabric.

Confidently activate your data

Microsoft Purview’s new data governance experience was made generally available on September 1, 2024. This newly reimagined solution is purpose-built for federated data governance and offers a business-friendly experience, AI-powered experiences for dramatic efficiencies, and all the key ingredients you’d expect, including catalog curation, data quality management, actionable insights, rich user experiences, and integration with third-party data management solutions—helping organizations to confidently activate their data for analytics and AI.

Microsoft Fabric customers can complement the governance capabilities in Fabric for a single-pane-of-glass experience in Microsoft Purview for data catalog curation, data user access, data quality management, health controls, and actionable insights for Fabric items and for data assets across your heterogeneous data environment.

A complete solution for the modern data governance practice

Data Catalog management offers a business-friendly experience and terms, making it easy to logically build a data catalog for your unique business needs while built-in AI serves up recommendations based on your active metadata. Data owners and data stewards can easily participate across data curation and management, responsible data access, and impact analysis—easily combining data assets from the heterogenous data estate (for example: Fabric, Databricks, Snowflake, and Google). Data users can seamlessly and securely request access to data assets for use in insights, analysis, development, and AI.

Data Health management offers a rich experience across data quality capabilities, actionable insights, and health reports, which help organizations to assess and action the quality of their governed data estate—making it easy and efficient to support a strong healthy data governance posture. With complete data quality capabilities, you can apply built-in rules and AI-generated rules that are applied and translate into data quality scores and actions across your data assets, data products, and governance domains, helping you to more effectively manage and improve your data governance posture. Data Health controls enable data stewards and chief data officers to assess the health of their data estate through the lens of industry-recognized standards and controls. While the control rules are established at a global level, execution is delegated to individual governance domains, allowing for the application of broad standards while meeting the specific needs of various groups within the organization.

Purpose-built integration with industry-leading master data management and data modeling solutions extend the value of Microsoft Purview further and help customers maximize their existing data management investments.

• CluedIn brings native master data management and Data Quality functionality to Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Purview, and the Azure stack. Learn more about CluedIn. 
• Profisee Master Data Management is a complimentary and necessary piece of your data governance strategy. Learn more about Profisee. 
• Semarchy combines master data management, data intelligence, and data integration into a singular application in any environment. Learn more about Semarchy.  
• RELTIO’s AI-powered data unification and management solutions unify data from disparate sources, delivering a single source of truth. Learn more about RELTIO.
• ER/Studio (an Idera company) delivers advanced data modeling and metadata management to help organizations improve their data posture. Learn more about ER/Studio.

The general availability release also delivered new data governance capability not previously available during preview. Some of these new capabilities include: customers can now delete business concepts, more easily manage data access through the data catalog admin settings, view data product access request workflows, browse an enterprise glossary to better understand terms, and apply the Data Quality capabilities to Azure Synapse, Databricks Unity Catalog, Fabric Lakehouse, Google Big Query (preview), and Snowflake. Check out the complete list of new capabilities in Microsoft Purview Data Governance.

Learn more about Microsoft Purview

• Try Microsoft Purview today.
• Watch the webinar The CDO Dilemma.
• Visit the Microsoft Purview website.

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 Activate your data responsibly in the era of AI with Microsoft Purview appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

As many of you look to AI transformation to drive the next wave of innovation, you now also need to account for data being both consumed and created by generative AI applications. The risks that come with implementing and deploying AI are not fully known, and it is only a matter of time before you start to see broader regulatory policies on AI. According to Gartner®, by 2027 at least one global company will see its AI deployment banned by a regulator for noncompliance with data protection or AI governance legislation.² AI will be a catalyst for regulatory changes, and having secure and compliant AI will become fundamental.

With these trends converging all at once, securing and governing all your data is a complex and multifaceted undertaking. You need to secure and govern different types of data (structured, unstructured, and data generated by AI). You need to secure and govern it in different locations across multiple clouds, and you need to account for existing and future data security, governance, and AI regulations.

Most organizations experience an average of 59 data security incidents per year and use an average of 10 solutions to secure their data estate.¹ This fragmented approach requires many of you to stitch together multiple tools to address data security and governance, which can lead to higher costs and difficulty in both procurement and management. The lack of integration between the disparate tools can cause unnecessary data transfers, duplicate copies of data, redundant alerts, siloed investigations, and exposure gaps that lead to new types of data risks and ultimately worse security outcomes.

A simpler approach: Microsoft Purview

To address these challenges, you need a simplified approach to data security, governance, and compliance that covers your entire data estate. Microsoft Purview is an integrated solution that helps you understand, secure, and manage your data—and delivers one unified experience for our customers.

With Microsoft Purview, you can:

• Gain end-to-end visibility and understanding of your entire data estate, across on-premises, multicloud, and software as a service (SaaS) environments, and for structured, unstructured, and data created by generative AI applications.
• Apply comprehensive data protection across your data estate, using AI-powered data classification technology, data maps, extensive audit logs and signals, and management experience.
• Improve your risk and compliance posture with tools to identify data risk and manage regulatory requirements.

Microsoft Purview

Help keep your organization’s data safe with a range of solutions for unified data security, data governance, and risk and compliance management.

What’s new in Microsoft Purview?

In this blog post, we will outline some of the exciting new capabilities for Microsoft Purview that we announced at Microsoft Ignite 2023.

Expanding data protection across the data estate

As we unveiled earlier this year, Microsoft Purview is expanding the sphere of protection across your entire data estate, including structured and unstructured data types. We are excited to share some of the next steps in that journey by providing you with:

• A unified platform that enables you to discover, label, and classify data across various data sources, including Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and other cloud environments.
• Consistent protections across structured and unstructured data types such as Azure SQL, Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), and Amazon S3 buckets.  
• Expanded risk detections enabling signals from infrastructure clouds and third-party apps such as AWS, Box, DropBox, and GitHub.

With these capabilities, you can gain visibility across your data estate, apply consistent controls, and ensure that your data is protected and compliant across a larger digital landscape. For example, you can scan and label your data in Microsoft Azure SQL, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Amazon S3 buckets, and enforce policies that restrict access to sensitive data based on data labels or user roles from one control plane—just like you do for Microsoft 365 sources. Check out this short Microsoft Mechanics video covering an end-to-end scenario. To learn more, we invite you to read the “Expanding data protection” blog.

Securing AI with Microsoft Purview

We are committed to helping you protect and govern your data, no matter where it lives or travels. Building on this vision, Microsoft Purview enables you to protect your data across all generative AI applications—Microsoft Copilots, custom AI apps built by your organization, as well as more than 100 commonly used consumer AI apps such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bard, Bing Chat, and more.³ We announced a set of capabilities in Microsoft Purview to help you secure your data as you leverage generative AI. Microsoft Purview will provide you with:

• Comprehensive visibility into the usage of generative AI apps, including sensitive data usage in AI prompts and total number of users interacting with AI. To enable customers to get these insights, we announced preview of AI hub in Microsoft Purview.
• Extensive protection with ready-to-use and customizable policies to prevent data loss in AI prompts and protect AI responses. Customers can now get additional data security capabilities such as sensitivity label citation and inheritance when interacting with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and prevent their users from pasting sensitive information in consumer generative AI applications.
• Compliance controls to help detect business violations and easily meet regulatory requirements with compliance management capabilities for Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is built on our security, compliance, privacy, and responsible AI framework, so it is enterprise ready. With these Microsoft Purview capabilities, you can strengthen the data security and compliance for Copilot. The protection and compliance capabilities for Copilot are generally available, and you can start using them today. To learn more, read the Securing AI with Microsoft Purview blog.

Supercharge security and compliance effectiveness with Microsoft Security Copilot in Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview capabilities for Microsoft Security Copilot are now available in preview. With these capabilities you can empower your security operations center (SOC) teams, your data security teams, and your compliance teams to address some of their biggest obstacles. Your SOC teams can use the standalone Security Copilot experience to analyze signals across Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview into a single pane of glass. Your data security and compliance teams can use the embedded experiences in Microsoft Purview for real-time analysis, summarization, and natural language search, for data security and compliance built directly into your investigation workflows.

Microsoft Purview capabilities in Security Copilot

To help your SOC team gain comprehensive insights across your security data, Microsoft Purview capabilities in Security Copilot will provide your team with data and user risk insights, identifying specific data assets that were targeted in an incident and users involved to understand an incident end to end. For example, in the case of a ransomware attack, you can leverage user risk insights to identify the source of the attack, such as a user visiting a website known to host malware, and then leverage data risk insights to understand which sensitive files that user has access to that may be held for ransom.

Security Copilot embedded in Microsoft Purview

We’ve also embedded Security Copilot into Microsoft Purview solutions to help with your data security and compliance scenarios. You can now leverage real-time guidance, summarization capabilities, and natural language support to catch what others miss, accelerate investigation, and strengthen your team’s expertise. Here’s where these capabilities will light up:

• Summarize alerts in Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention: Investigations can be overwhelming for data security admins due to the large number of sources to analyze and varying policy rules. To help alleviate these challenges, Security Copilot is now natively embedded in Data Loss Prevention to provide a quick summary of alerts, including the source, attributed policy rules, and user risk insights from Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management. This summary helps admins understand what sensitive data was leaked and associated user risk, providing a better starting point for further investigation. Learn more in our Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention announcement.
• Summarize alerts in Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management: Insider Risk Management provides comprehensive insights into risky user activities that may lead to potential data security incidents. To accelerate investigations, Security Copilot in Insider Risk Management summarizes alerts to provide context into user intent and timing of risky activities. These summaries enable admins to tailor investigations with specific dates in mind and quickly pinpoint sensitive files at risk. Learn more in our Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management announcement.
• Contextual summary of communications in Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance: Organizations are subject to regulatory obligations related to business communications, requiring compliance investigators to review lengthy communication violations. Security Copilot in Communication Compliance helps summarize alerts and highlights high-risk communications that may lead to a data security incident or business conduct violation. Contextual summaries help you evaluate the content against regulations or corporate policies, such as gifts and entertainment and stock manipulation violations. Learn more in our Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance announcement.
• Contextual summary of documents in review sets in Microsoft Purview eDiscovery: Legal investigations can take hours, days, even weeks to sift through the list of evidence collected in review sets. This often requires costly resources like outside council to manually go through each document to determine the relevancy to the case. To help customers address this challenge, we are excited to introduce Security Copilot in eDiscovery. This powerful tool generates quick summaries of documents in a review set, helping you save time and conduct investigations more efficiently. Learn more in our Microsoft Purview eDiscovery announcement.
• Natural language to keyword query language in eDiscovery: Search is a difficult and time-intensive workflow in eDiscovery investigations, traditionally requiring input of a query in keyword query language. Security Copilot in eDiscovery now offers natural language to keyword query language capabilities, allowing users to provide a search prompt in natural language to expedite the start of the search. This empowers analysts at all levels to conduct advanced investigations that would otherwise require keyword query language expertise. Learn more in our Microsoft Purview eDiscovery blog.

To learn more about Security Copilot and Microsoft Purview, read our Microsoft Security Copilot in Microsoft Purview blog.

Additional product updates

New Microsoft Purview Communications Compliance capabilities

Copilot for Microsoft 365 support introduces an advanced level of detection within Communication Compliance, allowing organizations to identify and flag risky communication, regardless of source. Investigative scenarios across various Microsoft applications, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and more, showcase the precision of this feature, identifying patterns, keywords, and sensitive information types. With additional features for policy creation and user privacy protection, administrators can also fine-tune their management strategy, ensuring secure, compliant, and respectful communications. Integration with Security Copilot further enhances data security and regulatory adherence, providing concise contextual summaries for swift investigation and remediation. Leveraging AI technology, Communication Compliance detects and categorizes content, prioritizing content that requires immediate attention. Reporting inappropriate content within Microsoft Viva Engage and ensuring compliance in Microsoft Teams meetings further strengthens the multilayered compliance defense. Stay ahead of compliance challenges and embrace these innovative features to secure, comply, and thrive in the digital age.

Learn more in our Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance announcement.

New to Information Protection in Microsoft Purview

As organizations prepare to use generative AI tools such as Copilot for Microsoft 365, leveraging Microsoft Purview Information Protection, discovery and labeling of sensitive data across the digital estate is now even more important than ever. New releases to Microsoft Purview Information Protection include intelligent advanced classification and labeling capabilities at an enterprise scale, contextual support for trainable classifiers that improve visibility into effectiveness and discoverability, better protection for important PDF files, secure collaboration on labeled and encrypted documents with user-defined permissions, as well support for Microsoft Fabric, Azure, and third-party clouds.

You can learn more about the new Information Protection capabilities in the Information Protection announcement.

New Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention capabilities

We are excited to announce a set of new capabilities in Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (Purview DLP) that can help comprehensively protect your data and efficiently investigate DLP incidents. Our announcements can be grouped into three categories:

• Efficient investigation: Capabilities that empower admins by making their everyday tasks easier, including enriching DLP alerts with user activity insights from Insider Risk Management, DLP analytics to help find the biggest risk and recommendations to finetune DLP policies, and more.
• Strengthening protection: Capabilities that help protect numerous types of data and provide granular policy controls, including predicate consistency across workloads, enhancements to just-in-time protection for endpoints, support for optical character recognition (OCR), and performance improvements for DLP policy enforcements.
• Expanding protection: Capabilities that extend your protection sphere to cover your diverse digital estate, including support for Windows on ARM and several enhancements to macOS endpoints.

Purview DLP is easy to turn on; protection is built into Microsoft 365 apps and services as well as endpoint devices running on Windows 10 and 11, eliminating the need to set up agents on endpoint devices. 

Learn more in our Microsoft Purview DLP blog.

New Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management and Adaptive Protection capabilities

To secure data in diverse digital landscapes, including cloud environments and AI tools, detecting and mitigating data security risks arising from insiders is a pivotal responsibility. At Microsoft Ignite, we made a few exciting announcements for Insider Risk Management and Adaptive Protection: 

• Intelligent detection across diverse digital estate: Insider Risk Management will now detect critical data security risks generated by insiders in AWS, Azure, and SaaS applications, including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub. Additionally, security teams can also gain visibility into AI usage with our new browsing to generative AI sites indicator.  
• Adaptive data security from risk detection to response: User context can help security teams make better data security decisions. Security teams can now gain user activity summary when a potential DLP incident is detected in Microsoft Purview DLP and Microsoft Defender portal. With this update and Adaptive Protection, user risk context is available from DLP incident detection to response, making data security more effective. In addition, security teams can now leverage human resources resignation date to define risk levels for Adaptive Protection, addressing common incidents, such as potential data theft from departing employees.  
• Streamlined admin experience for effective policies: To enable better policies management experience, Insider Risk Management will support admin units and provide recommended actions to fine tune policies and receive more high-fidelity alerts. 

Learn more details about all these announcements in our Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management blog.  

Get started today

These latest announcements have been exciting additions to help you secure and govern your data, across your entire data estate in the era of AI. We invite you to learn more about Microsoft Purview and how it can empower you to protect and govern your data. Here are some resources to help you get started:

• Watch the Microsoft Purview on-demand sessions from Microsoft Ignite, outlined in this guide.
• Try Microsoft Purview for free.
• Read the Data Security Index report.
• Visit the Microsoft Purview website.

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.

¹Microsoft Data Security Index: Trends, insights, and strategies to secure data, October 2023.

²Gartner, Security Leader’s Guide to Data Security, Andrew Bales. September 7, 2023.

³Microsoft sets new benchmark in AI data security with Purview upgrades, VentureBeat. November 13, 2023.

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.

The post New Microsoft Purview features use AI to help secure and govern all your data appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Start your journey with Microsoft towards quantum-safety.

View the questionnaire

We believe the first step every organization should take toward quantum safety is to be aware of the need to organize, plan, and begin an impact assessment. We recommend prioritizing symmetric encryption where applicable and subsequently adopting post-quantum cryptography (PQC) for asymmetric encryption once standardized and approved by relevant setting bodies and governments, as recommended by cybersecurity agencies globally. Furthermore, we are exploring and experimenting with additional classical and quantum security solution layers through internal experiments, POCs, and collaborations with partners. 

Given that preparing for such an objective will be a multi-year and iterative process that requires strategic foresight, it’s crucial for organizations to start investing time in their planning and execution efforts today. Thanks to our extensive experience in quantum engineering and expertise as a service and security provider, we can serve as a trusted partner to navigate this process across industry and government. 

Tomorrow’s quantum computers threaten today’s data 

In our previous blog post, we discussed the limitations of current quantum computers in terms of breaking today’s encryption technology. In parallel, the emergence of scaled quantum computers with specific algorithms—such as Shor’s algorithm—could put public key encryption at risk and compromise sensitive information. 

While it may take at least 1 million qubits for a quantum computer to break certain encryption algorithms using Shor’s algorithm, today’s long-term and sensitive data could already be at risk: bad actors could carry out a “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” scenario by recording data today and decrypting it later when cryptographically relevant quantum computers become available. Therefore, knowing which data to secure now is a first step on the path to a quantum-safe future.  

Microsoft’s commitment to keeping our customers and partners secure 

Putting our recommendations into practice, we have taken a comprehensive approach to quantum safety. Because quantum will have a material impact on today’s classical encryption of both hardware and software, we’ve invested time and efforts to set cross-company goals and establish accountability at the most senior levels of our organization. This led to the establishment of the Microsoft Quantum Safe Program, which aims to accelerate and advance all quantum-safe efforts across Microsoft from both technical and business perspectives. The program focuses on Microsoft’s transition to quantum safety and the adoption of PQC algorithms across our products, services, and datacenters. Additionally, it aims to assist and empower our customers and partners on their own journey to quantum safety across their processes, priorities, and requirements.  

As the first step and highest priority, we are ensuring the compliance of our existing symmetric key encryption and hash function algorithms. Symmetric algorithms, such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), and hash functions, such as Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), are resilient to quantum attacks, and can therefore still be used in deployed systems. At Microsoft, we are already using protocols based on symmetric encryption, such as Media Access Control Security (MACsec) point-to-point protocol. 

On top of symmetric encryption, we will prioritize PQC algorithms—still in the process of being standardized by global bodies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), International Standards Organization (ISO), and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)—to handle future threats where asymmetric encryption is currently used. Today, much of the internet’s data, from e-commerce to Wi-Fi access, is kept secure by public key, or asymmetric key cryptography. Currently used public key algorithms rely on complex mathematical problems considered infeasible for classical computers to break, but that are a perfect task for quantum computers running Shor’s algorithm. This undermines the effectiveness of public key algorithms like RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), and means that PQC algorithms will need to be deployed quickly once standardized, starting with hybrid encryption schemes in tandem with classical algorithms to accelerate adoption. 

Empowering and collaborating with the global community 

We see the effort to achieve quantum safety as a collaborative effort, and this is why we invest heavily in our ecosystems, global partnerships, and close collaborations with standards-setting bodies, academia, and industry partners alike to foster continuous innovation in the quantum security landscape. The standardization of PQC algorithms, driven by NIST’s efforts, is a key step to achieving PQC compliance.

Because we believe that PQC adoption is the ideal path to follow, we’re collaborating with standard-setting bodies while conducting experiments and assessments to facilitate the adoption of these algorithms across our services and products as needed.  As an example, we are participating in the NIST/NCCoE Migration to PQC to demonstrate vulnerable cryptography detection and drive PQC experiments and integration capabilities. Those efforts, along with our participation in the Open Quantum Safe project, will allow the members to implement and test PQC candidates together, so we can be ready for adoption once the final specs are out.  

Furthermore, as part of our investment to empower and collaborate with the global security community, we co-authored FrodoKEM, a quantum-safe key encapsulation mechanism that has been selected, together with Kyber and Classic McEliece, to be part of the first international ISO standard for PQC (in addition, we are participating as co-editors of the standard). We also recently submitted SQISign, a new quantum-safe signature scheme that we co-authored with several industry and academia partners, to NIST’s call for additional signature schemes. Lastly, we continue to actively participate as founding members of the new post-quantum cryptography coalition by MITRE and will help to drive progress toward a broader understanding of the public adoption of PQC and NIST’s recommendations. 

While we continue to conduct research to further develop state-of-the-art security solutions, we are also exploring the potential of other classical and quantum technologies, such as Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). Holistically, at the core of our mission is a commitment to achieving quantum-safety and ensuring the security of our customers.

Getting started with your PQC transition today  

To support our customers in preparing for and navigating their quantum-safe journey, we offer assistance and guidance: we invite you to start your path with us by filling out this questionnaire. Based on your responses, we can understand your status and priorities, and provide the necessary support, including access to experts.  

As a first step, we recommend starting with a comprehensive planning process and a definition of your organization’s criteria for what constitutes your critical areas and sensitive information, alongside a cryptography inventory and impact assessment of your essential data, code, cryptographic technologies, and the critical services of your organization. This will help you to identify any asymmetric encryption in use that will need to be replaced with the latest PQC standardized algorithms. This process is especially important to identify critical areas and systems that involve or protect sensitive data with a value that extends beyond 10 years and should be prioritized in migrating to PQC. 

By considering which data and code need to be secured now, and which may become less relevant over time, as well as uncovering specific instances where cryptography could be used inappropriately or not ideally, your organization will have a better understanding of where to best mitigate potential risks as a quantum future approaches. This will enable you to confidently make the switch to the latest PQC standardized algorithms and safeguard your sensitive data for years to come. 

Explore CodeQL  

To help, we are contributing to CodeQL: a next-generation program code analysis tool provided by GitHub in collaboration with organizations including NIST and NCCoE. With CodeQL, we are building out a comprehensive set of detections that can empower users to create a complete inventory of all encryption usage within the application layer, helping to produce a cryptographic bill of materials and identify legacy cryptography that requires remediation. This tool can thus help create a cryptography inventory and impact assessment that will drive operational planning and create understanding and clarity around the timeline, resources, and level of risk for which to account.

Try now the Crypto Experience for Resource Estimator  

Furthermore, we recently launched the Crypto Experience for Azure Quantum Resource Estimator. Drawing on published research from Microsoft, this new interactive cryptography experience will show you why a symmetric key could remain safe from quantum attacks, but the current public key is vulnerable. And because it is integrated with Copilot in Azure Quantum, you can use the universal user interface of natural language to ask, learn, and explore more topics within the intersection of quantum computing and cryptography.  

The opportunity to usher in a quantum, and quantum-safe, future is immense. We see how the collective genius of scientists and businesses will revolutionize the building blocks of everyday products to usher in a new era of innovation and growth in many fields. That’s what motivates us at Microsoft to drive new breakthroughs and empower every person and every organization on the planet. Our commitment to our customers, partners, and ecosystem to become quantum-safe and remain secure has never been stronger. We are accountable for having our products and services quantum-resistant and safe and will support and guide our customers through this journey to quantum safety. 

Learn more

• Start your journey with Microsoft towards quantum-safety by filling out this questionnaire. 
• Learn more about our vision of quantum networking.
• Explore the Open Quantum Safe project for prototyping and evaluating quantum-resistant cryptography.
• Visit the Azure Quantum website and check out the Microsoft Quantum Innovator Series webinars.

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 (formerly known as “Twitter”) (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Starting your journey to become quantum-safe appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

I recently worked with an enterprise customer who experienced a data exfiltration attack using the characteristics of the BazaCall campaign. BazaCall can be both a ransomware and data exfiltration attack that are used together to increase pressure on and damage to the victim. Microsoft Purview has data security capabilities that form part of a holistic mitigation strategy.

Microsoft 365 Defender is our security solution for phishing and related cyberthreats. Some great analysis has been done by the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team on BazaCall’s Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs). They’ve also shared how to use Microsoft 365 Defender to locate exploitation activity.

I wanted to take another perspective with this post and share the role that Microsoft Purview data security solutions play, together with Microsoft 365 Defender and Microsoft Sentinel, to provide defense-in-depth mitigation. With defense-in-depth, we create barriers to the bad actor, increasing their resources required and uncertainty, interfering with their business case.

Microsoft Purview provides important value with unified data governance and compliance solutions but it’s Microsoft Purview’s data security capabilities within Microsoft 365 we’ll be discussing in this blog.

What makes BazaCall different from most phishing attacks is using a malicious email to have the victim initiate a call to a phony call center run by the bad actor that then coaches the victim to install malware. Replacing malicious links and attachments in email with a phone number to the call center is used to evade email protection.

An overview of the BazaCall attack flow is provided at the end of this post.

The mitigations suggested here will be of value for attacks where the bad actor has control of a Microsoft 365 account and is attempting to exfiltrate sensitive data.

The data security benefits of Microsoft Purview for attack mitigation are sometimes overlooked. These solutions may be managed by other groups in the organization, such as the compliance team rather than the security team, and so may not be the go-to tools in the toolbox when preparing for or responding to an attack. These solutions should be part of a defense-in-depth strategy and Zero Trust architecture.

Microsoft Purview Mitigations

Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels can be applied to protect sensitive files from unauthorized access. These sensitivity labels can have scoped encryption, among other protections, which travels with the file inside and outside of the organization’s environment. This would make the file unreadable except by the party for which the encryption is scoped—for example, only employees, a partner, or a customer organization—or it can be defined by the user to be consumable only by specific individuals.

Figure 1. Sensitivity Label with scoped encryption—accessible only to employees.

Automation, configured by the administrators, can be used to support the user in applying these labels including making the application of a label mandatory if the file contains sensitive information.

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (Purview DLP) can be used to prevent the sensitive information from being exfiltrated through several egress channels, including user’s endpoint devices, Microsoft cloud services such as SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Exchange Online, Teams, and Microsoft PowerBI, browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Chrome, and Firefox, as well as non-Microsoft applications such as Salesforce, Dropbox, Box, and more, including the free file-sharing services used as part of the BazaCall TTPs.

Customers can create policies that block and do not allow override for their top priority sensitive information such that even if the bad actor manages to get access to the user’s account, they are blocked from exfiltrating any sensitive content. Purview DLP policies can be configured leveraging a variety of out-of-the-box or custom criteria including machine learning-based trainable classifiers as well as the sensitivity labels created in Information Protection.

Figure 2. Purview DLP preventing the upload of sensitive files into Dropbox.

Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management can alert the security team to the bad actor’s activities, including the exfiltration of sensitive information to the file-sharing service. Insider Risk Management can reason over and parse through user activity signals, by leveraging more than 100 ready-to-use indicators and machine learning models, including sequence detection and cumulative exfiltration detection. With Adaptive Protection powered by Insider Risk Management, the security team can detect high-risk actors, such as a bad actor-controlled account, and automatically enforce the strictest DLP policy to prevent them from exfiltrating data.  

Figure 3. Insider Risk Management uses specialized algorithms and machine learning to identify data exfiltration and other risks.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps can make a file-sharing site used for sensitive file exfiltration unreachable from the user’s browser or it can prevent sensitive files from being moved to the site. Alternatively, the policy can be configured to only allow files to be moved to the file-sharing site if they have a sensitivity label applied that contains scoped encryption. If this protected file is exfiltrated it would not be readable by the bad actor.

Figure 4. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps blocking access to file sharing and backup site.

Microsoft Purview Audit provides forensic information to scope a possible breach. This is especially valuable when bad actors are “living off the land.” Among the audit items made available are the terms that a user searched in email and SharePoint. If the bad actor was searching for sensitive information to exfiltrate, this item will assist the investigation.

Purview Audit, recently expanded for accessibility and flexibility, will also provide insight to mail items accessed and mail sent, which would be impactful when investigating scope and possible exfiltration channels. Although a bad actor’s known TTPs may not include these channels, we need a fulsome investigation. Their TTPs are likely not static.

Purview Audit Premium provides more logging event retention capabilities, with one-year retention (up from 180 days with Standard) and an option to increase retention to 10 years among other upgraded features.

Figure 5. Premium Audit solution searching forensic events.

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management policies and labeling could be used to purge unneeded information from the organization’s environment. An auditable review can be required prior to deletion or deletion can be automated without user or administrator action.

If information is not in the environment, it cannot be exfiltrated by the bad actor or put the organization at risk.

Figure 6. Disposal of unneeded documents reduces exfiltration risk to the organization.

About BazaCall

BazaCall uses a phishing campaign that tricks unsuspecting users into phoning the attacker, who coaches them into downloading BazaLoader malware, which retrieves and installs a remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool onto the user’s device. The email typically claims that the user has reached the end of a free trial of some type, that billing will begin shortly and provides an option to cancel by phoning a call center. The threat of unjustified billing is the lever that the attacker uses to get the victim to comply.

Typically, the file download has been a malicious Excel document that purports to be a “cancellation form” for the unwanted service and charges referred to in the phishing campaign. The bad actor coaches the victim into accepting macros and disabling security solutions to complete the phony “cancellation.”

RMM software provides multiple useful purposes for attackers: The software allows an attacker to maintain persistence and deploy malicious tools within a compromised network. It can also be used for an interactive command-and-control system. With command and control established, the bad actor organization can spread laterally through the environment to steal sensitive data and deploy ransomware. Once command and control of the user’s machine is established, bad actor hands-on keyboard is used to exfiltrate data including through free cloud-based file-sharing sites. TTPs have evolved in the last two years, including the use of file-sharing sites for exfiltration in addition to open-source tools like RClone.

The user is also subject to human-operated ransomware.

The mitigations discussed in this post are focused on the data exfiltration aspects in the “hands-on-keyboard” phase of the attack.

Figure 7. BazaCall attack flow.

Microsoft Purview can help protect from BazaCall attacks

Microsoft Purview data security for Microsoft 365 is not a cure-all for phishing attacks. It is part of a defense-in-depth strategy that includes user training, antimalware, vulnerability management, email security, access control, monitoring, and response. The data security solutions within Microsoft Purview should be considered based on risk-based criteria for inclusion in the strategy.

These tools may be managed by different teams in the organization. Collaboration among these teams is critical for coordinated defense and incident response. 

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 Twitter (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Microsoft Purview data security mitigations for BazaCall and other human-operated data exfiltration attacks appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

As the threat surface increases with remote and hybrid work, security professionals are being asked to protect more with less. Tight budgets and timelines often leave little time to share knowledge, grow skills, or nurture the next generation of defenders.

That’s why I’m proud to announce a new annual security event designed to empower our community—join us on March 28, 2023, for Microsoft Secure. Register today.

Security is human-first and tech-driven

I’m continuously awed and humbled by the ingenuity and dedication shown by cyber defenders at every level of our partner and customer ecosystem. The first iteration of Microsoft Secure will kick off an annual event designed to build on that spirit of ingenuity. Technology helps our security professionals do more, and it’s always powered by people­­—the quietly fearless security professionals who make everything possible and the CISOs in boardrooms fielding security questions from colleagues. Microsoft Secure is for you.

Discover the latest comprehensive security innovations designed for you

Microsoft Secure will kick off at 8:30 AM PT with conversations on the state of the industry between Microsoft leaders helping to deliver the products security teams use daily. I have the honor of delivering this year’s keynote, along with Charlie Bell, Executive Vice President, Microsoft Security, and we will share insights on how an AI-powered future in cybersecurity can create a safer world for all—you won’t want to miss this. Other speakers joining me include Joy Chik, President, Identity and Network Access, Microsoft, Bret Arsenault, Corporate Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, Microsoft, and and John Lambert, Corporate Vice President, Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft Security Research.

Innovation sessions highlighting our latest product updates across security, compliance, identity, management, and privacy will follow our keynotes. And around midday, you can attend breakout sessions, hands-on workshops, and product deep dives organized around four themes:

1. Discover technology across cloud security, security information and event management and extended detection and response, and threat intelligence enabled by AI.  
2. Enable smarter, real-time access decisions for all identities and cloud-managed endpoints.  
3. Minimize insider risk and safeguard sensitive information across platforms, app, and clouds.
4. Guard against threats like ransomware with Zero Trust architecture and built-in security.

For more interactive learning, join these live-open discussions and engagement opportunities, including Ask the Experts, Table Topics, and Connection Zone forums. Plus, our team will provide insights and answers to your questions in the event chat in real-time throughout the day.  

Join your security community at this new event

Deep dive with your peers into six hours of fresh announcements, innovations, and comprehensive security strategies. By joining our very first Microsoft Secure, you’ll:  

• Be among the first to see what an AI-powered future means for cybersecurity to help you protect more with less.
• Gain insights from industry experts to help you defend today and shape the future of security for tomorrow.
• Dive into deep technical content in the breakout sessions featuring extended detection and response, multicloud security, cloud-managed endpoints, Zero Trust, built-in security configurations, and more.
• Connect with your peers in a live question and answer chat and have your most pressing security questions answered by Microsoft experts.

Join us at Microsoft Secure to get the simplified, comprehensive protection you need to innovate and grow. Together, let’s create a safer world for all.

Register now for Microsoft Secure.

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.

The post Learn what an AI-driven future means for cybersecurity at Microsoft Secure appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Our customers have been clear in voicing their need for a unified, comprehensive solution for data security and management, one that’s as scalable as their business needs. In the Go Beyond Data Protection with Microsoft Purview digital event on February 7, 2023, Alym Rayani, General Manager of Compliance and Privacy Marketing at Microsoft, and I will discuss Microsoft’s approach to data security, including how to create a defense-in-depth approach to protect your organization’s data. We’ll also introduce some groundbreaking innovations for our Microsoft Purview product line—such as Adaptive Protection for data powered by machine learning—and invite new customers to sign up for a free trial. We remain guided by our core belief that security is a team sport. So in this blog, I’ll address how our newest innovations can help your team keep your data safe while empowering productivity and collaboration. We’ll also look at steps you can take to build a layered data security defense within your organization.

A new approach for a new data landscape

We’ve all seen how the ongoing shift to a hybrid and multicloud environment is changing how organizations collaborate and access data. Considering the massive amounts of data generated and stored today, it’s easy to see how this creates a business liability. More than 80 percent of organizations rate theft or loss of personal data and intellectual property as high-impact insider risks.³ Often the risk stems from organizations making do with one-size-fits-all, content-centric data-protection policies that end up creating alert noise. This signal overload leaves admins scrambling as they manually adjust policy scope and triage alerts to identify critical risks. Fine-tuning broad, static policies can become a never-ending project that overwhelms security teams. What’s needed is a more adaptive solution to help organizations address the most critical risks dynamically, efficiently prioritizing their limited security resources on the highest risks and minimizing the impact of potential data security incidents.

Adaptive Protection in Microsoft Purview is the solution. This new capability, now in preview, leverages Insider Risk Management machine learning to understand how users are interacting with data, identify risky activities that may result in data security incidents, then automatically tailor Data Loss Prevention (DLP) controls based on the risk detected. With Adaptive Protection, DLP policies become dynamic, ensuring that the most effective policy—such as blocking data sharing—is applied only to high-risk users, while low-risk users can maintain their productivity. The result: your security operations team is now more efficient and empowered to do more with less.

Adaptive Protection in action

Let’s take a look at how Adaptive Protection can benefit your organization in everyday use. Imagine there’s a company named Contoso where Rebecca and Chris work together on a confidential project. Rebecca and Chris both try to print a file related to that project. Rebecca gets a policy tip to educate her that the file contains confidential information and that she will need to provide a business justification before printing. But when Chris tries to print the file, he gets blocked outright by Contoso’s endpoint DLP policy. 

So, why do Rebecca and Chris have different experiences? The security team at Contoso uses Adaptive Protection, which detected that Chris has a privileged admin role at Contoso, and he had previously taken a series of exfiltration actions that may result in potential data security incidents. As Chris’s risk level increased, a stricter DLP policy was automatically applied to him to help mitigate those risks and minimize potential negative data security impacts early on. On the other hand, Rebecca has only a moderate risk level, so Adaptive Protection can educate her on proper data-handling practices while not blocking her ability to collaborate. This also influences positive behavior changes and reduces organizational data risks. For both Rebecca and Chris, the policy controls constantly adjust. In this way, when a user’s risk level changes, an appropriate policy is dynamically applied to match the new risk level.

With Adaptive Protection, Contoso’s security team no longer needs to spend time painstakingly adding or removing users based on events, such as an employee leaving or working on a confidential project, to prevent data breaches. In this way, Adaptive Protection not only helps reduce the security team’s workload, but also makes DLP more effective by optimizing the policies continuously.

Adaptive Protection in Microsoft Purview integrates the breadth of intelligence in Insider Risk Management with the depth of protection in DLP, empowering security teams to focus on building strategic data security initiatives and maturing their data security programs. Machine learning enables Adaptive Protection controls to automatically respond, so your organization can protect more (with less) while still maintaining workplace productivity. You can learn more about Adaptive Protection and watch the demo in this Microsoft Mechanics video.

Fortify your data security with a multilayered, cloud-scale approach

As I speak with customers, I continue to hear about their difficulties in managing a patchwork of data-governance solutions across a multicloud and multiplatform environment. Today’s hybrid workspaces require data to be accessed from a plethora of devices, apps, and services from around the world. With so many platforms and access points, it’s more critical than ever to have strong protections against data theft and leakage. For today’s environment, a defense-in-depth approach offers the best protection to fortify your data security. There are five components to this strategy, all of which can be enacted in whatever order suits your organization’s unique needs and possible regulatory requirements.

1. Identify the data landscape: Before you can protect your sensitive data, you need to discover where it lives and how it’s accessed. That requires a solution that provides complete visibility into your entire data estate, whether on-premises, hybrid, or multicloud. Microsoft Purview offers a single pane of glass to view and manage your entire data estate from one place. As a unified solution, Microsoft Purview empowers you to easily create a holistic, up-to-date map of your data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, and end-to-end data lineage. Now in preview are more than 300 new, ready-to-use trainable classifiers for source code discovery, along with 23 new pre-trained out-of-the-box trainable classifiers that cover core business categories, such as finance, operations, human resources, and more.
2. Protect sensitive data: Along with creating a holistic map, you’ll need to protect your data—both at rest and in transit. That’s where accurately labeling and classifying your data comes into play, so you can gain insights into how it’s being accessed, stored, and shared. Accurately tracking data will help prevent it from falling prey to leaks and breaches. Microsoft Purview Information Protection includes built-in labeling and data protection for Microsoft 365 apps and other Microsoft services, including sensitivity labels for Outlook appointments, invites, and Microsoft Teams chats. Microsoft Purview Information Protection also empowers users to apply customized protection policies, such as rights management, encryption, and more.
3. Manage risks: Even when your data is mapped and labeled appropriately, you’ll need to take into account user context around the data and activities that may result in potential data security incidents. As I noted earlier, internal threats accounted for almost 35 percent of unauthorized access breaches during the third quarter of 2022.² The best approach to addressing insider risk is a holistic approach bringing together the right people, processes, training, and tools. Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management leverages built-in machine learning models to help detect the most critical risks and provides enriched investigation tools to accelerate time to respond to potential data security incidents, such as data leaks and data theft. Recent updates include sequence detection starting with downloads from third-party sites and a new trend chart to show a user’s cumulative data exfiltration activities. And to help reduce noise and ensure safe and compliant communications, we’ve added a policy condition to exclude email blasts (such as bulk newsletters) from Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance policies.
4. Prevent data loss: This includes unauthorized use of data. More than 85 percent of organizations do not feel confident they can detect and prevent the loss of sensitive data.⁴ An effective data loss protection solution needs to balance protection and productivity. It’s critical to ensure the proper access controls are in place and policies are set to prevent actions like improperly saving, storing, or printing sensitive data. Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention offers native, built-in protection against unauthorized data sharing, along with monitoring the use of sensitive data on endpoints, apps, and services. DLP controls can be extended to macOS endpoints, non-Microsoft apps through Microsoft Defender for Cloud apps, and to Google Chrome, providing comprehensive coverage across customers’ environments. We now also support in preview DLP controls in Firefox with the Microsoft Purview Extension for Firefox. And now with the general availability of the Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention migration assistant, you’re able to automatically detect your current policy configurations and create equivalent policies with minimal effort.
5. Govern the data lifecycle: As data governance shifts toward business teams becoming stewards of their own data, it’s important that organizations create a unified approach across the enterprise. This kind of proactive lifecycle management leads to better data security and helps ensure that data is responsibly democratized for the user, where it can drive business value. Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management can help accomplish this by providing a unified data-governance service that simplifies the management of your on-premises, multicloud, and software as a service (SaaS) data. Now in preview, simulation mode for retention labels will help you test and fine-tune automatic labeling before broad deployment.

And lastly, we’re making it easier for you to assess and monitor your compliance posture with integration between Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager and Microsoft Defender for Cloud. This new integration enables your security operations center to ingest any assessment in Defender for Cloud, simplifying your work by bringing together multiple services in a single pane of glass.

Data protection that keeps you moving forward fearlessly

Data is the oxygen of digital transformation. And in the same way that oxygen both sustains life and feeds a fire, each organization must strike a balance between ready access to data and securing its combustible elements. At Microsoft, we don’t believe your business should have to sacrifice productivity for greater data protection. This is where Adaptive Protection in Microsoft Purview excels—empowering your security operations center to efficiently safeguard sensitive data with the power of machine learning and cloud technology—without interfering with business processes. If you’re not already a Microsoft Purview customer, be sure to sign up for a free trial. 

Mark your calendar for Microsoft Secure on March 28, 2023, where you’ll hear about even more Microsoft Purview innovations. This new digital event will bring together customers, partners, and the defender community to learn and share comprehensive strategies across security, compliance, identity, management, and privacy. We’ll cover important topics such as the threat landscape, how Microsoft defends itself and its customers, the challenges security teams face daily, and the future of security innovation. Register now.

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 Twitter (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹How Much Data Is Created Every Day in 2022? Jacquelyn Bulao. January 26, 2023.

²Insider threat peaks to highest level in Q3 2022, Maria Henriquez. November 2022.

³Build a Holistic Insider Risk Management Program, Microsoft. October 2022.

⁴2021 Verizon Data Breach Report. 2021.

The post Introducing Adaptive Protection in Microsoft Purview—People-centric data protection for a multiplatform world appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

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.

The post 4 things to look for in a multicloud data protection solution appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.