For information stored on-premises, we rely on the features designed to help us govern access and protect information stored there, such as the following:

• Sensitive information types
• Trainable classifiers
• Sensitivity labels
• The Azure Information Protection unified labeling client
• Double Key Encryption
• The Rights Management connector
• The Azure Information Protection unified labeling scanner
• Data loss prevention
• Endpoint data loss prevention

The same goes for the cloud environment, where we rely on the features in the cloud to help us achieve the same result, such as the following:

• Sensitive information types
• Trainable classifiers
• The data classification dashboard
• Sensitivity labels
• The Azure Information Protection unified labeling client
• Double Key Encryption
• Office 365 Message Encryption (OME)
• Service encryption with Customer Key
• SharePoint Information Rights Management (IRM)
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
• Microsoft Information Protection SDK
• Data loss prevention
• Endpoint data loss prevention
• Protect sensitive information in Microsoft Teams chat and channel messages

As you can see, the capabilities are largely intended to be used both in your own on-premises environment and in the cloud. Microsoft Information Protection is intended to help you safeguard your information regardless of where the information is stored, processed, or travels to. All of these features will be covered in the coming chapters of the book, providing you with the theoretical and practical skillset to understand, explain, and implement these features in your organization.

To summarize, the scope of Information Protection is basically everywhere you are storing data.

The following diagram shows us the capabilities of Information Protection and how they all work together in order to keep our data as safe as possible:

Figure 2.5 – Capabilities of Microsoft Information Protection

As we have just covered, the scope of Information Protection is not limited to a specific workload in cloud apps, on-premises data centers, or information stored on an employee’s computer. It is all three. To fully cover every inch of intellectual property with labels, protection via encryption, and prevention against data leaks is the main goal of implementing Information Protection capabilities. Next, we will talk more about the regulatory requirements Information Protection can help us stay compliant with.

Why is Information Protection important?

Information Protection is an important feature to help you stay compliant with regulatory requirements such as the following:

• GDPR
• LGPD
• HIPAA-HITECH

Information Protection helps you with insights and technical enforcement to stay compliant with all three mentioned previously.

Regulatory requirements are of course a big part of why Information Protection is important, but the intellectual property of your organization could be a big part of this as well, making sure that sensitive information about your organization or your business does not fall into the wrong hands.

Bear in mind that the implementation of Information Protection does not automatically protect you from any harm on its own. The implementation must be accompanied by policies with regard to information and sharing it internally, as well as the will of your employees to understand why it is important to label information, protect it, and minimize the risks of accidental or malicious sharing.

Information Protection is important to stay compliant with regulatory requirements, and as we have talked about in the previous sections, to keep your data safe and accessible by intended users only.

Next, we will cover the topic of the benefits of implementing Information Protection in your organization.

What are the benefits of implementing Information Protection in your organization?

Some benefits have been covered previously when it comes to regulatory compliance and protection from insider risk. But something we have not talked about yet is the importance of raising security awareness inside your organization.

Here, an implementation of Information Protection would help your users to understand which types of information are subject to protection using encryption or information barriers.

Information Protection not only safeguards any information protected by it, but it also will help with making your users aware of how to interact with information within your organization in a safe manner, due to visual markings on labeled information, notifications from data loss prevention policies, and the requirement to set permissions on data labeled as classified.

Summary

This chapter has been about providing an introduction to Information Protection, what capabilities it has, and how it could help your organization to safeguard data and protect it from accidental or malicious sharing of information.

In order to implement and administer Information Protection, you will need to have knowledge about all of the capabilities presented. Perhaps not in depth, as there are quite a few features available, but knowing about them will make the implementation and administration of the platform easier.

In the next chapter, we will cover the subject of how to create and manage sensitive information types, which is the first step of implementing Information Protection.