Protect your Data
with AIP

Protect your data with AIP

As companies navigate their way through remote and hybrid working, it’s vital to ensure that flexibility is never at the expense of security.

Microsoft have a range of products available to help strike the right balance between freedom and security for your organisation. One of these is Azure Information Protection, or AIP, which helps keep your business safe in three main ways: encryption, allowing and rescinding access to documents, and classification and labelling. Let’s look at these below.

Encrypt with AIP

Encryption prevents data exposure by making it unreadable to anybody who has unauthorised access.

Office Message Encryption (OME) which is a part of AIP allows you manually encrypt documents and emails. Policies can also be applied by your Administrator which sets encryption when sending or receiving from specific individuals or groups. This provides a much-needed additional layer of security for your emails, helping to keep yours and your customers’ data confidential.

Allowing and rescinding access to documents

AIP also allows you to set limits on recipients’ actions – you can allow viewing, printing, copying, and forwarding of both emails and documents saved in SharePoint or OneDrive. Users can also rescind access to documents once permission has been granted either manually or automatically by specifying an allocated time when it is available. This feature is especially beneficial when sharing sensitive financial information or sales quotes as, for example, your prices may rise the following year.

Classification and labelling

Another benefit of AIP is that you can choose who can see documents and folders, and assign levels of confidentiality and importance through classification and labelling. For example, if you’re working on a document that contains staff salaries, you could apply a “Finance” label which would ensure only the Finance Director and MD (or whoever has permission in the policy) would have access to it.

So, if a user were to apply an AIP policy which meant the recipient could only view a document, the information cannot be copied, sent, or screen grabbed – it keeps the information completely secure and also cannot be shared or stored.

An important aspect to note is that the labels and classifications are customisable and can be set up to suit the structure of your business. Also, as with all aspects of Microsoft 365, security measures are associated with accounts and not devices, which means AIP is available to you across all devices in any location.

If you’d like to learn more about AIP, or about how to maintain security alongside flexibility, please feel free to give us a call.