This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.
The intent of this blog series is to help customers refresh their understanding of service side auto-labeling with hero scenarios explained. In addition to the Playbook we recently released, this series will help guide you in setting up auto-labeling policies and take action to enforce those policies in simulation mode. We will add new content to this blog every few weeks to cover a range of topics related to auto-labeling.
How can auto-labeling help your organization?
Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) provides a unified set of capabilities to know your data, protect your data, and protect against data loss across Microsoft 365 apps and services. Foundational to Microsoft are its classification capabilities—from out-of-the-box sensitive information types to machine learning trainable classifiers to automatically finding and classifying sensitive content at scale. MIP’s auto-labeling capability helps customers to quickly classify more of their ever-increasing data and protect sensitive content.
Sensitivity labels are at their basic level a tag, that is customizable, persistent, accessible to applications, and visible to users. Labels once applied to documents and email become the basis for enforcing data protection policies throughout the tenants’ digital estate. When a label is applied to a file or email it is persisted as document metadata. When a label is applied to a SharePoint site or OneDrive for business the label persists as container metadata.
With auto-labeling policies, administrators can automatically apply sensitivity labels to email messages, OneDrive files, and SharePoint files that contain sensitive information. This labeling is applied by services rather than applications, so you don’t need to worry about what type of client the user is using. This label will be automatically applied to content that matches the rules and related conditions here. Auto-labeling also places labels on emails sent to users for whom the policy applies.
When to use service-side auto-labeling?
There are two different methods for automatically applying a sensitivity label to content in Microsoft 365 – Client-side labeling and Service-side labeling. For the purposes of this blog, we’re focusing on Service-side auto-labeling.
Service-side auto-labeling is sometimes referred to as auto-labeling for data at rest and data in transit. Unlike client-side auto-labeling, service-side auto-labeling does not depend on the client to analyze the document content while it is being created. Instead, service-side auto-labeling reviews content that is stored (at-rest) in SharePoint or OneDrive document libraries, or that is "in-flight" or being sent within Exchange. Because this labeling is applied by services rather than by applications, you don't need to worry about what apps users have and what version. As a result, this capability is immediately available throughout your organization and is suitable for labeling at scale. Auto-labeling policies don't support recommended labeling because the user doesn't interact with the labeling process. Instead, the administrator runs the policies in simulation mode to help ensure the correct labeling of content before applying the label.
This ability to apply sensitivity labels to content automatically is important because:
- You don't need to train your users when to use each of your classifications.
- You don't need to rely on users to classify all content correctly.
- Users no longer need to know about your policies—they can instead focus on their work.
Other topics you can look forward to seeing over the next few weeks:
- How do I get started?
- Container labels vs Auto-labeling
- Impact of changing labels to auto-labeling
- How to fine-tune policies