Office 365 compliance controls: Data Loss Prevention

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AppId is over the quota

 Shobhit Sahay is a product marketing manager on the Exchange team.

When was the last time you asked your employees to carry your company's handbook containing all the company policies with them? Do your IT workers know whether a particular email message they're sending may violate company policy and run the risk of being noncompliant? Are they sure whether an email they're sending contains sensitive information? Almost every IT worker faces compliance questions like these daily. Learn how you can help your IT workers achieve compliance without disrupting their normal routine or yours.

A recent blog post laid out the two dimensions of Office 365 security, compliance, and privacy: built-in capabilities and customer controls. This post focuses on a key feature under customer controls in compliance: data loss prevention (DLP).

DLP Policy Tips inform your workers in real time

With the new DLP Policy Tips in Office 365, admins can inform email senders that they may be about to pass along sensitive information that is detected by the company's policies-before they click Send. This helps your organization stay compliant and it educates your employees about custom scenarios based on your organization's requirements. It accomplishes this by emphasizing in-context policy evaluation. Policy Tips not only analyzes email messages for sensitive content but also determines whether information is sensitive in the context of communication. That means you can target specific scenarios that you associate with risk, external communication for example, and configure custom policy tips for those scenarios. Reading those custom policy tips in email messages keeps your workers aware of your organization's compliance policies and empowers them to act on them, without interrupting their work.

DLP Policy Tips is supported only in Outlook 2013, but even if your users don't have the latest version of Outlook, you are still protected from disclosing sensitive data through back-end processing. Admins can configure rules and take actions by setting up DLP rules in the Exchange Administration Center (EAC). This ensures that a single DLP policy controls both the client and server endpoints, minimizing the admin administrative overhead.

How do Policy Tips work? Consider a real-life scenario. Contossoplay is a company that has an internal policy to warn its employees any time they include sensitive information like a credit card number in email communications. Sara Davis is a Contossoplay employee composing an email to Dan, who works outside her organization. She includes credit card information in the mail, and immediately a DLP policy tip shows up in the message in Outlook.

When you include sensitive information in an email message, a DLP policy tip alerts you before you send the message.

At this point Sarah can decide to: send the email message with the credit card information, send the message with the credit card information and click Report to report a false positive, or delete the credit card information before sending the message. If she's unsure what to do, she can click Learn more to understand her company's policy, which her admin may have customized. 

Let's  look at another scenario. Contossoplay has recently set up a policy that blocks emails containing multiple credit cards or that need to be overridden with a business justification. Sara starts an email message to book the travel for multiple employees in the company and attaches a document that includes the personal credit card information of the employees. A different policy tip shows up, highlighting the new compliance requirement. In Outlook 2013, the attachment that is the cause of concern is also highlighted, making it easy for her to locate the information being questioned.

A custom DLP policy tip alerts you about an attachment that may contain high-count sensitive information.

As these two scenarios show, data loss prevention empowers end users, making them part of the organization's compliance process and ensuring that the business flow is not interrupted or delayed, because achieving compliance does not get in users' way. At the same time, data loss prevention simplifies compliance management for admins, because it enables them to maintain control easily through the Exchange Administration Center in the Office 365 admin portal.

Policy Tips are similar to MailTips, and you can configure them to present a brief note in Outlook 2013 that provides information about your business policies to the person creating a message. You can configure policy tips that will merely warn workers, block their messages, or even allow them to override your block with a justification. Policy tips can also be useful for fine-tuning your DLP policy effectiveness, because they allow end users to easily report false positives. If policy tips are not available to a user in Outlook, admins can still control compliance behavior by setting up rules in the Exchange Administration Center. For example, admins can set up an action to generate incident reports if a particular DLP event occurs. Such incident reports can help tracks events in real time, because a report is generated in real time and sent to a designated mailbox, such as the mailbox for incident manager account. The figure below shows a sample incident report.

You can generate incident reports for specific DLP events in Office 365.

What does data loss prevention in Office 365 offer?

Data loss prevention in in Office 365 helps you identify, monitor, and protect sensitive information in your organization through deep content analysis. DLP is increasingly important for enterprise message systems, because business-critical email often includes sensitive data that needs to be protected. Worrying about whether financial information, personally identifiable information (PII), or intellectual property data might be accidently sent to unauthorized users can keep a Chief Security Officer (CSO) up all night. Now you can protect sensitive data more easily than ever before, without affecting worker productivity. Admins can easily set up compliance management in email using the Exchange Administration Center (EAC) in the Office 365 admin portal. In the EAC, you can:

Start with a preconfigured policy template that can help you detect specific types of sensitive information such as PCI-DSS data, Gramm-Leach-Bliley act data, or even locale-specific personally identifiable information (PII).Use the full power of existing transport rule predicates and actions and add new transport rules.Test the effectiveness of your DLP policies before fully enforcing them by running the rule in the Test mode.Incorporate your own custom DLP policy templates and sensitive information types.Detect sensitive information in message attachments, body text, or subject lines and adjust the confidence level at which Exchange takes action.Add policy tips, which can help contextually educate your end users by displaying a policy tip in Outlook. This can also enable users to provide feedback via false-positive reporting.Review incident data in message-tracking logs or add reporting by using a new generate-incident report action.Look at the different DLP reports in the Office 365 admin center to drive compliance adoption in the organization.

How do I get started with data loss prevention?

Using the Microsoft-supplied DLP policy templates is an easy way to get started. DLP policies are packages of transport rules with new features that you can customize. These rules include classification types that define the type of content you are looking for in the DLP policy. You can use the Exchange management shell, the Exchange Administration Center (EAC), or even your own XML file editor to start incorporating DLP policies into your messaging environment. The screenshot below shows the data loss prevention management interface within EAC.

You can manage DLP from the Exchange Administration Center in the Office 365 admin portal.

DLP is accomplished through what is called "transport rules" in Exchange. The new transport rules include a significant new approach to detecting sensitive information that can be incorporated into mail flow processing. This new DLP feature performs deep content analysis through keyword matches, dictionary matches, regular expression evaluation, internal functions such as validate checksum on credit card numbers, and other content examination to detect specific content types within the message body or attachments. Here is a screenshot for the policy tip rule that triggered the policy tip above in the second screenshot.

You can configure policy tip rules to trigger specific alerts about sensitive content in email.

How do I establish policies that protect  sensitive data?

You can start using DLP in one of these three ways:

Apply an out-of-the-box template supplied by Microsoft. The quickest way to start using DLP policies is to create and implement a new policy using a template. This saves you the effort of building a new set of rules from scratch.Import a prebuilt policy file from outside your organization. You can import policy templates that have already been created outside of your messaging environment by independent software vendors. In this way you can extend the DLP solution to suit your business requirements.Create a custom policy without any preexisting conditions. Your enterprise may have its own requirements for monitoring certain types of data known to exist within a messaging system. You can create a custom DLP policy to check and act on your own unique message data.

Sensitive information types in DLP policies

When you create DLP policies, you can include rules that include checks for sensitive information. The conditions that you establish within a policy, such as how many times something has to be found before an action is taken or exactly what that action is, can be customized within your new custom policies in order to meet your business requirements. Sensitive information rules are integrated with the transport rules framework by introducing a condition that you can customize: If the message contains...Sensitive Information. This condition can be configured with one or more sensitive information types that are contained within messages.

To make it easy for you to use the sensitive information-related rules, Microsoft supplies policy templates that already include some of the sensitive information types. Here is the inventory of the sensitive information types supplied out of the box.

Data loss prevention in Office 365 is one of the major customer compliance control features offered to customers. Other compliance features under customer controls are available, such as in-place eDiscovery and in-place legal hold. We'll discuss these customer controls more in-depth in future blog posts.

So get started today and make your organization more compliant, without impacting your users' or your productivity, using data loss prevention.

--Shobhit Sahay

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Cloud Services you can trust: Security, Compliance and Privacy in Office 365

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

 When you make a decision to place your trust in a cloud services provider for productivity services, security, compliance, and privacy are top of mind. With over a billion customers on Office and decades of experience running online services, we understand what it takes to earn and continue to maintain your trust and confidence in Office 365.

Our construct for security, compliance and privacy in Office 365 has two equally important dimensions - Built-in capabilities that include service-wide, technical capabilities, operational procedures and policies that are enabled by default for customers using the service and Customer controls that include features that enable you to customize the Office 365 environment based on the specific needs of your organization.

We will look at Built-in capabilities and Customer controls for each of the key pillars of trust - Security, Privacy and Compliance - in more detail below.

Security

Security of our customers' information is a key trust principle. We implement policies and controls to safeguard customer data in the cloud and provide unique customer controls that you can use to customize your organizational environment in Office 365.  

As an Office 365 customer, you will benefit directly from in-depth security features that we have built into the service as a result of experience gained from years of building enterprise-grade software, managing a number of online services and billions of dollars in security investments. We have implemented technologies and processes that are independently verified to ensure high security of customer data.

Some key aspects of our built-in security capabilities are:

Physical security - We monitor our data centers 24/7 and we have technologies and processes to protect our data centers from unauthorized access or natural disastersSecurity best practices -We use best practices in design like Secure Development Lifecycle and operations like defense-in-depth to keep your data secure in our data centersData encryption - Every customers' email content is encrypted at rest using BitLocker Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryptionSecure network layer - Our networks are segmented, providing physical separation of critical back-end servers from the public-facing interfaces at the same time our Edge router security detects intrusions and signs of vulnerabilityAutomated operations like Lock Box processes - Access to the IT systems that store customer data is strictly controlled via lock box processes. This access control mechanism is similar to a system where two people have to turn the key for an action to be allowed.

As a result of Office 365 offering productivity services to a wide range of industries, we have built both features and choices that you can control to enhance the security of data based on the needs of your organization. 

Some key aspects of our customer controls for security are:

Exchange Hosted Encryption - Enables delivery of confidential business communications safely, letting users send and receive encrypted email directly from their desktops as easily as regular email.S/MIME - Enables encryption of an email messages and allows for the originator to digitally sign the message to protect the integrity and origin of the message. As part of our continued investment in security technologies that Government and Security conscious customers care about, we are adding support for S/MIME for Office 365 in the first quarter of Calendar Year 2014.Rights Management Services - Enables a user to encrypt information using 128-bit AES and use policies on email or documents so that the content is appropriately used by specified people.Role based access control - Allows administrators to enable access to authorized users based on role assignment, role authorization and permission authorization.Exchange Online Protection - Allows administrators to manage your company's Anti-virus and Anti-spam settings from within the Office 365 administration console.Identity Management - Provides organizations with various options for identity management such as cloud based identity, identities mastered on-premises with secure token based authentication or hashed passwords to integrate into the Office 365 identity management system based on the security needs of your organization.Two factor Authentication - Enhances security in a multi-device, mobile, and cloud-centric world by using a second factor, such as a PIN, in addition to the primary factor which is identity.

Another key principle of Office 365 trust is Compliance.  It is expected that commercial organizations have regulations and policies that they must comply with to operate businesses in various industries. These policies can be a mix of external regulatory requirements that vary depending on industry and geographical location of the organization and internal company-based policies.  Office 365 provides built-in capabilities and customer controls to help customers meet both various industry regulations and internal compliance requirements.

Office 365 stays up-to-date with many of today's ever-evolving standards and regulations, giving customers greater confidence.  To bolster this and to continue earning your confidence, we undergo third-party audits by internationally recognized auditors as an independent validation that we comply with our policies and procedures for security, compliance and privacy.

Some key aspects of built-in compliance capabilities are:

Independently Verified - Third party audits verify that Office 365 meets many key world-class industry standards and certificationsControl framework - We follow a strategic approach of implementing extensive standard controls that in turn satisfy various industry regulations. Office 365 supports over 600 controls that enable us to meet complex standards and offer contracts to customers in regulated industries or geographies, like ISO 27001, the EU Model Clauses, HIPAA Business Associate Agreements, FISMA/FedRAMP Comprehensive Data Processing Agreement - Our Data Processing Agreement comprehensively addresses privacy and security of customer data, helping customers comply with local regulations

We provide Compliance controls within the service to help our customers comply based on the policy needs of their organization. 

Some key customer controls for compliance are:

Data Loss Prevention - Helps customers to identify, monitor and protect sensitive data through content analysisArchiving - Allows organizations to preserve electronically stored information retaining e-mail messages, calendar items, tasks, and other mailbox itemsE-Discovery - Permits customers to retrieve content from across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, and even file shares

Privacy is our third trust principle.  As more and more customers are relying on online service providers to keep their data safe from loss, theft, or misuse by third parties, other customers, or even the provider's employees, we recognize that cloud services raise unique privacy questions for businesses.   

To meet your needs, we are continually developing technologies to enhance privacy in our services. We call this privacy by design - which is our commitment to use best practices to help protect and manage customer data. 

Key built-in capabilities and principles of Privacy in Office 365 are:

No Advertising - We do not scan email, documents, build analytics or data mine to build advertising products. In fact, we do not use your information for anything other than providing you services you have subscribed for.Data Portability - As an Office 365 customer, your data belongs to you, and you can export your data at any time with no restrictions. We act only as a data processor and provider of productivity services, not as a data owner Notice and Consent - When we act upon your data, we let you know why and we ask for permission in advance or redirect any enquiries to our customers unless legally prevented to do so.Breach Response - We have strong, tested and audited processes to inform you if there is a breach and remediate issues if they occur.Data Minimization - We strive to minimize the actual amount of customer data that our internal teams have access to.

In addition to built-in capabilities, Office 365 enables you to collaborate through the use of transparent policies and strong tools while providing the distinct ability to control information sharing.

Some examples of customer controls for privacy are:

Rights Management in Office 365 - Allows individuals and administrators to specify access permissions to documents, workbooks, and presentations. This helps you prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people by applying intelligent policiesPrivacy controls for sites, libraries and folders- SharePoint Online, a key component service of Office 365 that provides collaboration functionality has a number of privacy controls. One example is that SharePoint Online sites are set to "private" by default. A second example is that a document uploaded to a SkyDrive Pro is not shared until the user provides explicit permissions and identifies who to share with.Privacy controls for communications - In Lync Online, another key component service that provides real time communications in Office 365, there are various administrator level controls as well as user level controls to enable or block communication with external users and organizations. One example is blocking access to federation in Lync. Similarly there are controls throughout the service for the admins and users to ensure privacy of their content and communications.

At Microsoft, we have been building Enterprise software for over two decades and we run over 200 online services. We bring all of this experience to Office 365 to give you industry leading capabilities in security, compliance and privacy. In addition, we take the advantage of scale and continuous feedback from providing services to a diverse customer base across industry and geography to constantly learn and improve the Office 365 services. Security, Compliance and Privacy are the key pillars of the Office 365 Trust Center (the other two pillars being Transparency and Service Continuity). Customers can have confidence that Microsoft is a thought leader and will continue to make deep investments to protect customers in the cloud.

Learn more about security, compliance, and trust in this weeks Garage Series: Explaining data security and your control in Office 365.

Learn more about recent compliance agreements with the announcement for the state of California and Microsoft signing the CJIS security policy agreement.

-- Vijay Kumar

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