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KuppingerCole rates Microsoft as outstanding in functionality for secure collaboration

  • By Rudra Mitra, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Data Security and Compliance

We are excited to share that Microsoft has been rated “Outstanding in Functionality” in the KuppingerCole Market Compass for Secure Collaboration, May 2022. Microsoft was also the only company to be awarded the highest possible score of “Strong Positive” in all five categories: security, deployment, interoperability, usability, and market standing for the Microsoft Purview Information Protection platform.

KuppingerCole graphic awarding rewarding Microsoft with Outstanding Functionality rating.

The Secure Collaboration Market Compass report covers solutions that protect sensitive data, which includes intellectual property or information restricted to certain audiences (such as trade secrets, some legal contracts, agreements, and financial statements), along with personally identifiable information (PII) and health information for regulatory standards such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). As companies shift towards remote hybrid work, protecting sensitive data that is continuously created and shared among employees, contractors, partners, and suppliers—while not impeding worker productivity—is becoming increasingly important. Enterprises today face the challenge of classifying large volumes of data, especially personal data, which is required by privacy regulations and laws worldwide.

At Microsoft, our goal is to provide a built-in, intelligent, unified, and extensible solution to protect sensitive data across your digital estate—in Microsoft 365 cloud services, on-premises, third-party software as a service (SaaS) applications, and more. With Microsoft Purview Information Protection, we are building a unified set of capabilities for classification, labeling, and protection, not only in Microsoft Office apps but also in other popular productivity services where the information resides (such as SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Microsoft Teams), as well as endpoint devices.

“Microsoft Purview Information Protection provides a sophisticated classification system that can apply labeling to a document based on the creator, the context in which it was created, and/or the content within the document. The functionality is natively embedded into Office services and apps, and third-party applications via the information protection SDK. Sensitive information is discovered and labeled with out-of-the-box, custom, and machine learning (trainable) functionality,” Annie Bailey, KuppingerCole analyst, writes in the report. “Information such as credit card, social security number (SSN), person names, licenses, and business categories like healthcare or financial can be classified out-of-the-box. Custom fields include RegEx, Dictionary, Fingerprint, Named entities detection (e.g., person name, address, medical terms), Exact Data Match, and credentials.”

We are also pleased that KuppingerCole recognizes the breadth and depth of our Microsoft Purview Information Protection platform and called out these strengths:

•  Double Key Encryption provides additional security and governance control.
•  Built into frequently used enterprise applications.
•  Simulations to test policy effectiveness.
•  Interoperates with Microsoft and third-party event logs.
•  Automated and manual classification options.
•  Coverage of structured and unstructured data in the Microsoft environment.
•  Data loss prevention functionality in Teams chat.
•  Option for no configuration, default classification.

We have made significant investments in our Microsoft Purview solutions (such as Data Loss Prevention, Compliance Manager, Data Lifecycle Management, Insider Risk Management, and eDiscovery) and Microsoft Priva privacy solution that leverage our advanced classifiers, unified labeling and protection, sensitive information types, and policy authoring templates provided by our Microsoft Purview Information Protection platform.

More than 200 partners are part of our Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA). Partners can leverage our labeling features through our Information Protection SDK, data connectors, and Graph APIs to provide integrations with Microsoft applications and services, security and compliance solutions, and their own products.

We are honored to have been designated as “Outstanding in Functionality” by KuppingerCole and rated the highest possible score of “Strong Positive” in five different categories.

Learn more

We invite you to read the full KuppingerCole Secure Collaboration report. For more information on our Microsoft Purview solutions, please visit our website. Visit the Microsoft Purview Information Protection platform page to learn more about how to protect your data wherever it lives.

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.