Microsoft Azure Information Protection is a powerful tool that can help you protect your sensitive data and ensure its confidentiality.
If you’re looking for a way to protect your sensitive data and ensure its confidentiality, Microsoft Azure Information Protection (AIP) can help. Whether you’re dealing with financial records, customer information, or other types of sensitive data, AIP can help you keep it safe from unauthorised access and misuse.
What Microsoft Azure Information Protection can do
Classification and Labelling: AIP allows you to classify and label your data based on its sensitivity level. You can create customised labels and apply them to your documents and emails, making it easy to identify and manage your sensitive data.
Encryption and Rights Management: AIP uses encryption and rights management technology to protect your data from unauthorised access. You can apply different levels of encryption and access controls to your data based on its classification, ensuring that only authorised users can access it.
Policy Enforcement: AIP provides policy enforcement capabilities that allow you to define and enforce data protection policies across your organisation. You can create policies that require users to apply labels to their documents and emails, and restrict access to sensitive data based on user roles and permissions.
Monitoring and Reporting: AIP provides monitoring and reporting capabilities that allow you to track and audit user activity related to your sensitive data. You can generate reports that show who has accessed your data, when they accessed it, and what they did with it.
The main strengths and weaknesses of Microsoft Azure Information Protection vs. alternatives
In comparison to alternative apps, such as Symantec Data Loss Prevention and McAfee Data Protection, Microsoft Azure Information Protection is known for its ease of use and integration with other Microsoft products. Symantec Data Loss Prevention offers a similar range of data protection capabilities, but may be more difficult to use for organisations not familiar with the software. McAfee Data Protection is known for its strong data loss prevention capabilities, but can also be complex to set up and manage. Ultimately, the best choice of software depends on the specific needs and preferences of the user and the organisation.
Here’s what people most often tell us they like about AIP:
Comprehensive Data Protection: Basically, its data protection is really good. AIP provides comprehensive protection for sensitive data, including classification, labelling, and encryption, keeping data protected both at rest and in transit.
Ease of Use: AIP integrates well with Office 365 and other Microsoft products, so it’s easy to use and manage for organisations already using Microsoft tools.
Flexibility: AIP offers a range of protection options, so you can customise its data protection policies to match the particular requirements of your industry or your own company’s policies.
Collaboration: AIP allows for secure collaboration both within and outside of an organisation, making it easy to share sensitive information with external partners.
The main moans about Microsoft Azure Information Protection often focus on the following:
Limited Integration: While AIP integrates well with other Microsoft products, some people have reported difficulty integrating it with third-party applications. This may be something to do with…
Complexity: Some companies report they found AIP complex to set up and manage. This seems to be a comment coming from companies with complex data protection needs which need to do implement a lot of the customised settings.
Cost: People always moan about prices. AIP can be expensive for smaller organisations or those with limited budgets, but frankly we think it’s competitive compared to alternatives.
The Review of Reviews
PC Mag
Tim Ferrill of UK PC Mag reviewed Microsoft Azure Information Protection years ago when it was first in preview release, but his review is still ranking on page one of Google.
His conclusion was:
‘Overall, AIP offers an impressive set of functionality that’s easy to set up and configure, places minimal overhead on the user, and fills a security need that’s common to a wide variety of industries.’
Trust Radius
Trust Radius reviewers have over the years given the product 8.5 stars out of 10.
Meanwhile on Microsoft’s own website it gets a somewhat more tepid score of 3.5 out of 5. Negative comments –currently 27% of reviewers give it 1 star – seem to come from companies that did a self-installation and struggle with understanding the product. They focus on the fact it doesn’t behave as expected, or is difficult to implement, with one reviewer saying it “has a beta feel to it” and others complaining about a lack of Microsoft support or their difficulties around compatibilities. Meanwhile the positive reviews seem to come from more expert users, or from companies that we’re lucky enough to encounter no problems with their implementation.
Our Conclusion
We think this is a great performer for the right company, and by this we mean that you either have technical staff to implement and configure the product exactly how you want it, or that you happen to be entirely Microsoft based and won’t encounter any unusual needs.
If you’re interacting with other companies’ products, or if you don’t understand up-front precisely all the ways this security product is going to affect you users’ daily work prior to implementing, we think you are going to have the same problems with any of the alternative products, too. Given this, we suggest you talk to a vendor-neutral IT provider that can review your needs then recommend and implement the best solution.
