Microsoft is launching the preview of Adaptive Protection, a new machine-learning-enabled capability in Microsoft Purview designed to help organizations balance data protection and productivity.
The new solution included in Microsoft Purview, the company’s suite of data protection tools, essentially combines the controls from Data Loss Prevention (DLP) with the investigation skill of Insider Risk Management for a solution that mitigates individual risks without compromising protection, productivity and privacy, the company says.
Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of security, compliance, identity and management, says Adaptive Protection makes DLP policies dynamic, ensuring that the most effective policy is applied only to high-risk users. Meanwhile, low-risk users can maintain their productivity, which in turn helps security teams become more efficient and do more with less.
Adaptive Protection can detect when users have privileged admin roles within their organization and automatically apply a stricter DLP policy to that user to help mitigate the risk of a possible data security incident, Microsoft says. Meanwhile, regular end users with a moderate risk level will get policy tips to educate them when accessing files contain sensitive information. In some cases–such as printing confidential information–they may need to provide a business justification for accessing that file.
Adaptive Protection in Microsoft Purview is also designed to influence positive behavior and reduce organizational data risks, and policy controls constantly adjust when a user’s risk level changes.
According to Jakkal, Adaptive Protection enables security teams to longer need to add or remove users based on events–such as an employee leaving or working on a confidential project–to prevent data breaches.
Adaptive Protection not only helps reduce the security team’s workload, but also makes DLP more effective by optimizing the policies continuously, Jakkal says in the blog.
“Adaptive Protection in Microsoft Purview integrates the breadth of intelligence in Insider Risk Management with the depth of protection in DLP, empowering security teams to focus on building strategic data security initiatives and maturing their data security programs,” Jakkal writes. “Machine learning enables Adaptive Protection controls to automatically respond, so your organization can protect more (with less) while still maintaining workplace productivity.”
In addition to urging customers to leverage Microsoft Purview to create a defense-in-depth approach with other Microsoft Purview innovations, Jakkal says the company is integrating Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager and Microsoft Defender for Cloud to enable security teams to ingest any assessment in Defender for Cloud and simplify their work by bringing together multiple services in a single pane of glass.
That integration will go into public preview next month, the company says in a Tech Community blog.
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