Completely fresh after my vacation I thought it would be awesome to have a look at Endpoint Data Loss Prevention (DLP), which was announced during Microsoft Inspire. Endpoint DLP extends the activity monitoring and protection capabilities of DLP to sensitive content on Windows 10 devices. The best part of it is that the actual functionality is built-in to Windows 10 (and the Edge Chromium browser). No additional agent is required, just the onboarding of the device. In this post I want to start with a short introduction about Endpoint DLP, followed by the actions to onboard devices and to configure DLP policies and settings. I want to end this post by having a quick look at the end-user experience.
Let’s start with a quick introduction about Endpoint DLP. Endpoint DLP is an extension on the activity monitoring and protection capabilities that are provided by DLP, for sensitive content that is used on Windows 10 devices. That can be content that is directly edited in SharePoint Online, or OneDrive, but also content that is only locally available on the Windows 10 devices. So no dependency on the location of the data, but only on the data itself (and of course the device that it’s used on). Really awesome!
At this moment Endpoint DLP enables organizations to audit and manage activities of users on sensitive items. Activities like created, renamed, printed and more. For a complete list, refer to the documentation. Besides that, Endpoint DLP monitors the activity based on MIME type, which means that an extension change doesn’t stop content from be monitored. At this moment the list of supported file extensions is documented here.
To enable Endpoint DLP, make sure that the following is in place:
The first action that should be performed is onboarding the devices into device management. After onboarding the devices, the activities of those devices can be reviewed in features like activity explorer, or can be monitored by compliance solutions such as insider risk management and data loss prevention (DLP). To enable the onboarding, simply follow the next three steps.
After successfully performing the previous steps, the devices that are already onboarded via Microsoft Defender ATP will start appearing in the devices list. When not already using Microsoft Defender ATP, devices can be onboarded by using the same process as for onboarding devices for Microsoft Defender ATP. When using Microsoft Intune that means following the next 10 steps.
Once the devices are onboarded, the next step is to have a look at the Endpoint DLP settings. These settings apply to all new and existing DLP policies that protect content on Windows devices and these settings are divided into the following three categories.
To optionally configure these settings simply open the Microsoft 365 compliance portal and navigate to Policies > Data loss prevention > Endpoint DLP settings (preview).
Once the generic Endpoint DLP settings are configured, the next step is to have a look at configuring an Endpoint DLP policy. That’s actually just configuring a normal DLP policy with a new endpoint specific section. Let’s walk through those configurations by configuring a DLP policy that is based on the defaults of the GDPR template. To achieve that, simply follow the 11 steps below.
Now let’s end this post by having a look at the end-user experience. Based on the usage of the GDPR template, I can show some nice examples of the user experience when working with personal information (like drivers license numbers). To show some examples of the behavior I’ve created a document, named Document5.docx, and that document contains a drivers license number. When I now want to copy content from that document, I receive a notification as shown below in Figure 6 and when I now want to print that document, I receive a notification as shown in Figure 7. Both notifications show the override option for the end-user, via the Allow button, as configured in the DLP policy (see Figure 5).
For more information about Microsoft Endpoint DLP, refer to the documentation that starts here with Learn about Microsoft 365 Endpoint data loss prevention (preview).
