Microsoft 365 is designed with industry-leading security measures and privacy policies to safeguard your data in the cloud, including the categories of personal data identified by the GDPR. Microsoft 365 can help you on your journey to reducing risks and achieving compliance with the GDPR.
One essential step to meeting the GDPR obligations is discovering and controlling what personal data you hold and where it resides. There are many Microsoft 365 solutions that can help you identify or manage access to personal data:
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Microsoft 365 can identify over 80 common sensitive data types including financial, medical, and personally identifiable information.
- Advanced Data Governance uses intelligence and machine-assisted insights to help you find, classify, set policies on, and take action to manage the lifecycle of the data that is most important to your organization.
- Microsoft 365 eDiscovery search can be used to find text and metadata in content across your Microsoft 365 assets. Advanced eDiscovery can help you identify documents that are relevant to a particular subject (for example, a compliance investigation) quickly and with better precision than traditional keyword searches or manual reviews of vast quantities of documents.
Another core requirement of the GDPR is protecting personal data against security threats. Current Microsoft 365 features that safeguard data and identify when a data breach occurs include:
- Advanced Threat Protection in Exchange Online Protection helps protect your email against new, sophisticated malware attacks in real time.
- Threat Intelligence helps you proactively uncover and protect against advanced threats in Microsoft 365.
- Advanced Security Management enables you to identify high-risk and abnormal usage, alerting you to potential breaches.
- Microsoft 365 audit logs allow you to monitor and track user and administrator activities across workloads in Microsoft 365, which help with early detection and investigation of security and compliance issues.
