New Office 365 Admin Center Offers to Create DLP Policy

Automated Policy Creation to Protect Sensitive Information

Microsoft currently offers Office 365 tenants the opportunity to preview a new version of the Office 365 Admin Center, which is expected to replace the current version later this year.

The new portal was on full display at the Ignite 2018 conference last September, and at the time Microsoft demonstrators promised me that we’d see automated suggestions surface in the portal to help tenant administrators get to grips with the range of functionality available to protect data. Remember that Microsoft gathers an enormous amount of signals about the content users create (something they need to be careful about in the era of GDPR), so they have masses of data to analyze to understand where improvements might be made.

This week, the first suggestion popped up in the Office365ITPros tenant when the portal offered us the opportunity to protect sensitive data better. In fact, a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy would do the trick.

Curious Choice for Data to Protect

When I examined the recommendation, I discovered that the Admin Center was concerned that my tenant wasn’t doing a good job of protecting content holding the U.S. Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) sensitive data type (one of the standard types available in Office 365).

The suggested settings seemed OK, so I clicked Create policy to see what would happen. After all, it couldn’t do any damage, could it?

Slight Error. Please Retry

Unhappily, the new Office 365 Admin Center was unable to create the DLP policy. Such is life and errors like this are prone to happen in preview releases.

You can expect Microsoft to continue to deliver automated suggestions through the Office 365 Admin Center to help administrators do a better job of managing their tenants. It will be interesting to see how far Microsoft goes with their suggestions and how tenants react to what’s suggested.

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While we’re waiting for Microsoft to complete the new Office 365 Admin Center and improve the automated creation of DLP policies, why not read Chapter 22 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to learn how to create policies manually.