Office 365 Event Driven Retention

There was interesting announcement last month for a new feature being released call Event Driven Retention.  Microsoft has been making tons of investments into Data Governance, and there is a specific feature called Office 365 Labels.  It is very exciting to see these mature, enterprise features being incorporated into the Office365.

So if you have content in Office 365 that has been labeled, when a business event occurs, retention will be applied based on that events occurrence.  For instance, lets say there is a business rule that you have to keep all contact information for 5 years when the contract expires.  With this solution, what that contract expires, the retention period will be enforced proactively for you.

If you dig a little deeper, there is really interesting capability within Office 365 Labels that automatically apply labels to content for you.  This drives down the responsibility we have placed on users in the past to manually classify and set retention periods for files.

Overview of event-driven retention - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Overview-of-event-driven-retention-dd851332-747b-45b9-82de-e3cd7d01c8a7

Overview of labels - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Overview-of-labels-af398293-c69d-465e-a249-d74561552d30

Office 365 Supervision

If you did not now, there was a recent announcement for a feature called Office 365 Supervision.  This feature is a “gem” of a feature for enterprise organizations that have complex compliance or regulatory requirements.  Office 365 Supervision feature is part of the Office 365 Advanced Data Governance (E5) service.

What Supervision provides is the ability to review (“supervise”) inbound/outbound data for your organization.  This is not a data loss prevention (DLP) solution; DLP is already provided through the Office 365 service.  What Supervision does is provide you the ability to create policies to monitor communications and designate reviewers who perform that monitoring (“supervision”).  Supervision can be done on more than just Office 365 data; if there is inbound/outbound data (including data going to Facebook, Twitter, etc.), these reviewers can review data that meets criteria. 

When creating a policy you have the ability to scope it to users, groups of users, and specify complex search criteria to identify the data.  For instance, you may have scenarios where you need to monitor how different groups within your organization talk with each other (i.e. make sure conversations are being firewalled) or you need to monitor communications are that are going external from your organization. 

Reviewers then have the ability to review messages that fall within a policy and then mark them as compliant, non-compliant, questionable and resolved communications.  Then you use Supervision reports to review policy compliance.

Announcement - https://blogs.office.com/2017/06/22/new-in-office-365-security-and-compliance-june-update/

Announcement - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Security-Privacy-and-Compliance/Announcing-GA-of-Supervision-in-Office-365-Advanced-Data/ba-p/69344

Supervision Policies - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Configure-supervision-policies-for-your-organization-d14ae7c3-fcb0-4a03-967b-cbed861bb086?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Supervision Reports - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Supervision-reports-2a762db5-e1c9-4c09-aa8e-bef49ce97209