How Sensitivity Labels Protect Your Data in Microsoft 365

As part of collaborating with people who are important for your business, you will have to share content within and outside your organization. The chances for a security breach or content reaching unwanted or unauthorized people are high in that case. What you can do is to set up a strong business and compliance policy for your organization and ensure that it is followed and obliged in all conditions. You can use Sensitivity Labels in Microsoft 365 to make your content available for sharing and collaboration, without leaving any room for security issues. The main cause of these sensitivity labels is to let people share and collaborate on documents without losing the ease of collaboration, at the same time not limiting on security. Get started with these Microsoft Information Protection features today.

To start using these priority labels, you should have a Microsoft 365 Work or School account. Let us explain how sensitivity labels protect your data in Microsoft 365 and what they are capable of.

What is A Sensitivity Label in Microsoft 365

Your organization will have different types of content with a variety of sensitive levels. With sensitivity labels, you can let your users know the sensitivity level of a particular content easily and protect this content with necessary caution. If your organization already has a Office 365 label classification taxonomy defined for each sensitivity level, you can name your priority labels based on that. You can also use simple terms such as private, public, sensitive, highly sensitive, etc. The advantage of using these simple terms is that users will be able to understand the kind of sensitivity content comes with.

Clearly, these Microsoft Information Protection options are well planned, and there is a great intention behind it.

What Sensitivity Labels Does

You need to understand what sensitivity labels can do to utilize them well. The following list will give you a decent idea about what they do.

• The basic action they take is to provide a certain protection level to your content. Content marking and data encryption are part of those protection settings. These settings can define what authorized users can do with these contents.
• Sensitivity labels can secure your content in Office Apps across various platforms and devices. It is supported in both desktop and web versions of Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint.
• With the help of Microsoft Cloud App Security, you can produce your content in third-party apps including Dropbox and SalesForce even if any such apps are not supporting the Priority labels feature.
• You can use Sensitivity labels to protect your content in containers like Teams, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365 Groups.
• By enabling the sensitivity labels option for PowerBI, you can view, apply, and use these labels to protect data when it is saved outside the service.
• A new feature is also in the preview stage which allows you to extend the priority labels feature to Azure Purview.
• These labels also offer the ability to extend their capability to third-party apps and services.
• Make use of the priority labels to classify content in your organization. This will help you to generate reports/analytics based on how each sensitivity label content is accessed and their activities. You can assign protection settings to these labels anytime in the future, even if you are not doing it in the first stage.

What Do You Mean by Label Scopes

Label scopes are a crucial element in sensitivity labels. It determines the label settings that can be configured, and where the label can be displayed. Scope configurations ensure that certain labels can only be assigned to documents and emails, and not for containers. Undoubtedly, when configured correctly, these Microsoft Information Protection features do well.

What Are Label Priority and Sublabels

You will be creating these labels in your admin center. On the Labels page, you can view the labels on the sensitivity tab. The labels in the list will be displayed in order. Labels with the least priority will come first and those labels which are of great priority will come at the bottom.

By using sublabels, you can assign one or more labels under a parent label. This helps you to make a precise Office 365 label classification among your documents that come under a certain sub-category. Sublabels just make it easier for users to showcase labels in logical groups. Lot more factors can be configured and updated to make sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365 effective. Learn more and protect your documents and content.