How Microsoft Purview DLP currently can help you protect confidential data in Copilot.

Organizations today face a difficult balancing act. Business leaders are eager to adopt tools like Microsoft Copilot to unlock productivity and innovation. Meanwhile, IT and security teams are concerned about safeguarding sensitive information, especially as AI-driven features process vast amounts of organizational data. This tension is real: enabling advanced capabilities without compromising compliance or data protection is a challenge every modern enterprise must solve. Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a key solution to this problem. It provides mechanisms to prevent confidential data from being exposed or misused, even in scenarios involving AI. I want to highlight two features designed to help organizations in controlling what is being processed by Copilot. Blocking Documents Based on Sensitivity Labels One of the foundational features of Purview DLP is its ability to enforce policies based on Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels. If your organization...

Prepare for: Multiple account access to Copilot in Microsoft 365

There is a new (As of January 30, 2025) policy setting is available in Cloud Policy, which will enable multiple account access to Copilot in Microsoft 365 desktop and mobile apps, allowing users to utilize Copilot across different signed-in accounts. 

The feature itself will allow a user to use a fully licensed Copilot feature from one tenant on "any" document available to them in a tenant they have access to. No matter if the user has Copilot in any of the other tenants. The feature will be rolled out globally from early March 2025 and is expected to be completed by late March 2025, but organizations might want to look into this policy and understand how it may or may not impact their existing security policies.

I recommend reading up on the following article, where details about what the user can access in different scenarios are described.

Here are some of the things to take into consideration: 

  • Copilot's data protection is based on the identity used to access the file, ensuring enterprise data protection regardless of the account used. 
  • The setting for web grounding in Copilot is also identity-based. If web grounding is disabled for a particular identity, it will remain disabled even when accessing Copilot from another account.
  • If a user is accessing a document in a different tenant, work grounded data from the home tenant will NOT be available
  • The feature will be available in most of the major apps. 
For organizations considering to restrict this behaviour, Microsoft has provided the following Learn Article.