Microsoft has today announced a new service, called Azure Information Protection that is an extension of its already comprehensive information protection capabilities. The new service is a result of the synergy between Microsoft’s Azure Rights Management Service(RMS) and recent Israeli acquisition, Secure Islands. The service is expected to launch next month.
As digital businesses continue to transform with cloud and mobile services leading the development pack, Microsoft wants to introduce significant innovations to enable high security and productivity. With its recent acquisition of the security firm Secure Islands, Microsoft wanted to beef up its enterprise cloud security.
Dan Plastina in the blogpost explaining the service added that,
This new approach delivers data protection, as well as innovative and intelligent new detection capabilities for security teams, while retaining great productivity experiences for people at work.
Microsoft believes that the Azure Information Protection(AIP) service will soon act as the foundation for secure cloud services, including app and data. Redmond, thus, wants to help organizations protect their data once it moves out of boundaries of a corporate network and potentially across many devices outside the company’s control. AIP will help prevent data loss and keep track of it at the file level, regardless of where it resides and who has access to it.
Key Capabilities
To protect enterprise data, Microsoft Azure Information Protection will provide users with some key capabilities:
- Use policies to allow you to classify, label and protect data at the time of creation or modification. Once data is classified and labeled, protection can be applied automatically.
- To ensure that your data is protected at all times, the classification and protection information travels with the data at all times, even on mobile.
- Allows you to safely share data with users within your organization as well as with external customers and partners.
- The classification and protection controls are built right into Office and other common applications. This provides you with simple and intuitive controls to stay productive and protect data in one single process.
- Document owners — which maybe you — can now track activities on the shared data and revoke access when necessary.
- This one’s a douse. Bring your own Key option. You can now manage your encryption keys and protect data stored on the cloud or on-premises.
Most of the features in the new Azure Information Protection tool retain the same capabilities as the current Azure RMS. But, it has been bolstered using Secure Islands tech to secure user-driven data and look into the contents of the document. It can thus realize if your organization’s internal data is being stolen and snooped into or not.
