Protecting documents with Azure Information Protection

Classified

Employees communicate with different people on many levels, ranging from the boss, through the intern, to external service providers. Ideally, not every email or document should be accessible to everyone. Azure Information Protection (AIP) is a cloud-based solution for classifying, identifying, and protecting documents and email. The administrator determines whether this is done manually by the user, automatically, or with a combination of both methods.

Microsoft uses Rights Management Services (RMS) technology to protect documents, which has been around a few years under the Active Directory (AD) RMS short form. Compared with this on-premises version, the advantage of AIP is that no complex server infrastructure is required; instead, Microsoft takes care of the public key infrastructure (PKI) certificates and the servers.

With AIP, you can be up and running as quickly as with AD RMS, including support for mobile devices. In some areas, the feature set goes even further: Templates for departments, for example, help limit the group of users, as does the option of tracking documents and locking them if necessary.

Meshing with Azure AD

To try AIP, you need an Office 365 subscription that includes AIP. If you already have a subscription, see the Azure documentation when you compare the different options [1] to find out which subscription or plan is available and what you need to do. From here, you can purchase a trial subscription directly or extend your existing subscription if you are already a customer of Microsoft's cloud. In both cases, you can test AIP for 90 days.

Each user must be assigned a license from the selected subscription in Office 365. How these users in the cloud access Azure AD – the location for Office 365 user and group identities – does not matter. The most direct way is to use Azure AD Connect to

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