Lots of organizations have internal SLAs or regulatory requirements to hang on to certain types of data for a specific period of time. Once this time is up, it’s important to remove such records to reduce the liability that comes from exposure to certain information.
Now, for organizations that are looking for a little more control, there are also records management features within the Security and Compliance Center.
Retention labels and policies however, are a fast and easy way to apply retention and deletion policies across Office 365. They are also a great place to get started with data governance and security for any organization.
Using Retention Labels for Other Policies
Retention labels can be used for far more than retention. They are primarily used to tag information in Microsoft 365 for the enforcement of content lifecycle management, but did you know that you can setup other policies in the Security and Compliance Center to reference your retention labels and policies?
Some organizations don’t have regulatory requirements but are concerned about Personal Identifying Information (PII) and sensitive information in their environment. In these cases, applying broad Retention Label policies that can be reused for (data loss prevention) DLP and sensitivity labels is one strategy to give you lots of visibility into your sensitive data without having to setup a bunch of unique policies in Microsoft 365.
DLP Policies
DLP policies are a great way to quickly understand which documents in Microsoft 365 have sensitive information. You can even use the reporting to quickly understand which ones have many instances of content that matches sensitive information types.
With an E5 license, those labels can even be automatically applied! If you want, you can base your sensitivity labels around your retention label policies, or you can come up with your own policies for each sensitivity label for more control.
Custom Sensitive Information Types
Microsoft 365 has had many sensitive information types for a long time but did you know that it’s now possible to create sensitive information types in Microsoft 365?
You can actually create a new sensitive information type from scratch using keywords, a regular expression of your own, or from choosing from dictionary keywords. You can use a custom sensitive information type with any of the policies that use them.
Balancing Policies & Managing Access in Microsoft 365
These are just some quick tips and tricks to get started managing information in Microsoft 365! It’s important to understand though, that while there are many tools to attempt to mitigate sensitive information and exposure to certain kinds of documents, there’s not really an interface that gives a comprehensive view of who has access to certain kinds of information, nor a way to prioritize sensitive information based on exposure or location.
If security and risk mitigation are becoming a higher priority for your organization, be sure to set up a time to chat with us and how we can help. And for a bit more on Policies and Insights, check out the video below:
Hunter Willis has been in web development, SEO and Social Media marketing for over a decade, and entered the SharePoint space in 2016. Throughout his career he has developed internal collaboration sites, provided technical and strategic advice, and managed solutions for small to large organizations. In addition, Hunter has served as a strategy consultant for many companies and non-profits in the Richmond area.