Automatic labelling at scale
Organisations are generating more and more data. If an organisation has many thousands or hundreds of thousands of documents, labelling these with an appropriate sensitivity label can be a challenge. There needs to be a way of labelling files at scale without the need for a user to open each file and label it.
Another new feature in public preview is auto-labelling policies, a service-side labelling feature for files stored at rest in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. It also supports email in transit in Exchange Online. Microsoft states that this feature does not include emails at rest.
For on-premises data, Microsoft offers the Microsoft Information Protection Scanner. This may be the feature of another article. For now, this article will focus on data in SharePoint Online.
Auto-labelling policies. How to label at scale in SharePoint Online
Consider the scenario where a user creates or uploads a file containing sensitive financial information into a SharePoint Online document library. This file has not been manually labelled with a sensitivity label by the user.