Managing and protecting data is critical to any organization. Data is growing exponentially, and remote work is making it even harder to manage risks around data. In fact, a recent Microsoft survey of security and compliance decision-makers found that data leaks are the top concern in remote and hybrid work scenarios.

To help our customers to address this challenge, today we are excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention (DLP).

A unified approach to data loss prevention

At Microsoft, we have long invested in developing information protection solutions for our customers. Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) is a built-in, intelligent, unified, and extensible solution that understands and classifies your data, keeps it protected, and prevents data loss across Microsoft 365 Apps (including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook), services (including Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange), third-party SaaS applications, and more—on premises or in the cloud. This unified data loss prevention approach provides simplicity, enabling you to set a DLP policy once and have it enforced across services, devices, and first-and third-party apps.

Endpoint DLP builds on the labeling and classification in Microsoft Information Protection and extends the existing DLP capabilities in Microsoft 365, helping you to meet compliance requirements and protect sensitive information on endpoints. It’s built into Windows 10, the Microsoft 365 Apps, and Microsoft Edge—without the need to deploy additional software on the device, which eliminates friction and makes it far easier to have visibility into your data. For users, it ensures security, without compromising productivity. Endpoint DLP provides policy tips to help educate users when they are about to violate a policy. It’s also integrated with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (formerly known as Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection), which can help you prioritize incident response based on additional factors.

New capabilities based on public preview feedback

With the general availability today, we’re happy to share that we’ve added additional capabilities as a part of the public preview program based on valuable feedback from our customers.

Last month, we also announced the addition of integration of unified data loss prevention with Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) in public preview, allowing you to extend data protection to non-Microsoft cloud apps. For example, say a user is trying to share a document in a third-party app on his or her mobile device. Because Microsoft Cloud App Security helps protect cloud apps, the same DLP policy will be triggered, both the end-user and the admin will receive a notification, and in this case, the link will be automatically disabled.

In addition, we heard feedback from some of you that you’d like to be able to leverage your existing security investments. Endpoint DLP integrates with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, but it is also compatible with most anti-virus software, which enables you to have a choice and extend the investments you’ve already made.

Today’s general availability announcement is only the beginning. We are also excited to announce some new capabilities going into preview today:

• Sensitivity labels are now included as a condition for Microsoft Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies. This lets you define new enforcement actions and locations within Endpoint DLP that take into account the sensitivity context of information to better meet protection requirements.

Figure 1: Using sensitivity labeling as a condition of a policy in Endpoint DLP.

• A new dashboard within Microsoft 365 compliance center helps you to manage DLP alerts. Alerts provide details about DLP events—including the sensitive information types detected in the content, confidence score rating, and event count—to help DLP reviewers quickly identify high-risk events so they can more effectively triage and remediate events.

Figure 2: Data loss prevention event alerts show in the new dashboard in Microsoft 365 compliance center.

• New conditions and exceptions announced in public preview enhance the already existing predicate capabilities in DLP. Mail flow predicates provide a high degree of flexibility to configure the applicable ‘include’ and ‘exclude’ conditions in DLP policies to ensure that specific policies are applied to emails that only match the defined conditions.

Figure 3: New conditions and exceptions you can extend to your DLP policies to email messages.

You can learn a lot more about these new public preview capabilities in the TechCommunity blog.

Protecting your data

We continue to invest in providing you with the tools and visibility you need to help to protect your most precious asset – your data.

Endpoint DLP general availability will start rolling out to customers’ tenants in Microsoft 365 E5/A5, Microsoft 365 E5/A5 Compliance, and Microsoft 365 E5/A5 Information Protection and Governance starting today. Learn more about Endpoint DLP by reading the TechCommunity blog and visiting our documentation. You can sign up for a trial of Microsoft 365 E5 or navigate to the Microsoft 365 compliance center to get started today.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.