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Data Loss Prevention in Microsoft 365

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CyNexLink Blog   •   December 28, 2017

 

Losing critical data can be an overwhelming blow to a company. Some may never recover or survive. From general email to end user files, contending with data loss has become a day-to-day affair for businesses.

Software as a service apps are not invulnerable to these data losses. Common examples of SaaS apps are email, calendaring and office tools like Microsoft Office 365.

Some of the most common causes of data loss are viruses or malware, hard disk or storage damage, software corruption, natural disaster and accidental deletion stemming from human error.

Considering Office 365 is the most commonly used office tool, it’s important that Microsoft has done a good job trying to mitigate data loss issues, though there is always the most common cause of data loss in Office 365: human error.

A slip of the mouse can wipe out critical documents.

Data loss can bear hefty financial consequences. In a study conducted by the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council, 20% of companies surveyed suffered $50,000 to $5 million in losses due to downtime from unrecoverable assets, lost productivity and declining confidence from consumers.

The study also displayed that more than half of companies that suffer catastrophic data loss from natural disasters generally go out of business. The assets lost generally cannot be recovered.

In that study, three out of four surveyed companies suffered a major data loss, which includes losing virtual machines, losing critical files, experiencing multiple days of downtime and losing critical software applications.

If a business cannot be revived from the brink within a week or so, the chance of survival is greatly decreased. This is due to diminished consumer confidence, security and employee morale in the wake of the disaster. Customers will immediately begin to leave for competing businesses.

Luckily, Office 365 has the ability to restore all things from the core environment, storing them in one of the various data centers tasked with data recovery.

While disasters are the extreme, simple deletions from human error also require restoration and Office 365 has these covered as well.

The Data Loss Prevention policy in Office 365 allows users to identify, monitor and protect sensitive information.

Users can identify important information throughout various locations, including OneDrive Business and Exchange Online. As an example, users can identify any document with a credit card number stored in a OneDrive Business site.

Users can prevent the accidental sharing of critical information by identifying a document or email containing sensitive information that may be shared with external sources and then block access to it.

Similarly to SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and OneDrive for Business, Excel, Power point and Word offer the same capabilities to find sensitive information and apply data loss prevention policies.

With an optimized data management system and IT infrastructure, you can boost your firm’s organizational and productive capabilities. Take a look at our portfolio to see how we’ve helped our clients enhance their business efforts. Contact us and find out how our IT specialists partner with you to accomplish your business’s goals.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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