Harness intelligence to protect and govern your most important data

To ensure effective protection and governance around your most important data, you should implement intelligent solutions and processes to automatically discover, classify, label, and monitor this data—no matter where it lives or travels.

The unified labeling experience in Office.com/setup 365, now generally available, provides organizations with a more integrated and consistent approach to creating, configuring, and automatically applying comprehensive policies to protect and govern data across devices, apps, cloud services, and on-premises locations. This new approach gives customers a single destination to create and configure data sensitivity labels for both Azure Information Protection and Office.com/setup 365, so you can set up sensitivity and retention labels and policies in the same place. These labels can be used to enforce policy across our information protection services—for example, Windows Information Protection will be able to understand the presence of a data sensitivity label in a document and apply the policy to protect that data on the device.

The unified labeling experience is complemented by user experiences built into Office.com/setup apps and Windows—no plug-ins or add-ons required. This native labeling is now available in public preview for Office apps on Mac, iOS, and Android—giving customers a labeling experience they are familiar with if they are already using the Azure Information Protection client on Windows. We also support a growing ecosystem of third-party apps and security solutions. Starting in October, you will be able to preview the ability to open protected PDF files directly within Adobe Acrobat on Windows.

Additionally, our Information Protection SDK is now generally available, making it easy for ISVs and third-parties to build labeling and protection experiences into their apps and services. Learn more about all these new updates that help you meet both your security and compliance needs at our Tech Community.

In addition to the new unified labeling experience, we have several updates to Office.com/setup 365 data governance capabilities. First, you can now auto-apply a label to Exchange Online content and to files associated with a specific content type in SharePoint Online, such as tax documents or human resources information. Once you map a content type to a retention label with an auto-classification query, you can auto-apply retention and deletion policies to all files with that content type. This new capability enables you to align labels to your existing information architecture and governance policies.

We also made it easier for you to configure complex record retention schedules for your departments, locations, and categories with the new file plan capability, now available in public preview. The file plan capability allows you to import or export the retention plan as a template and bulk edit labels, providing a more robust way to manage your record retention policies.

Finally, long-term audit log availability is now coming to public preview for Microsoft 365 and Office.com/setup 365 E5 subscribers. This is an important update for organizations that need long-term access to audit logs for regulatory or security purposes. The audit log availability has now increased from 90 days to one year.

Learn more about all of these data governance updates at the Tech Community blog.