Holistic Data Security and Compliance for Microsoft 365: Reducing Risk and Boosting Efficiency

Good governance requires not just securing data, but also having the right insights to make informed decisions and respond to incidents. Rubrik's integrated solution provides rich intelligence about your Microsoft 365 data risks, enabling proactive governance and faster incident response. One of the standout capabilities is its ability to detect publicly exposed or broadly accessible sensitive data.

In many organizations, it's alarmingly easy for a user to accidentally share a sensitive SharePoint document or for a link to a confidential OneDrive file to be open to the public. Rubrik continuously checks for these situations. It will detect files and folders in Microsoft 365 that contain sensitive information but are exposed via public or organization-wide access permissions, and alert you to those high-risk conditions ​.

With this visibility, administrators can rapidly remediate the issue by locking down the permissions or removing the file until it's properly secured, for instance. This closes a major data governance gap by ensuring that sensitive data isn't unintentionally left open to the whole company or the internet. In effect, Rubrik acts as a watchdog for data exposure, catching misconfigurations or oversights in Microsoft 365 sharing settings. This directly supports governance frameworks that demand strict control over who can access sensitive info.

Rubrik also provides improved risk assessment capabilities through its analytics and dashboards. Every piece of sensitive data discovered is not just listed, but contextualized with risk scoring. Rubrik's Data Security Posture dashboard can calculate risk levels based on factors like the sensitivity of data and the scope of access.​ For example, a file containing thousands of credit card numbers that is widely shared has a much higher risk score than an encrypted file with a few internal IDs. These kinds of insights help security and compliance teams prioritize their efforts and focus first on the highest risk items.

Rubrik also includes what it calls "User Intelligence", which correlates sensitive data to user activity and access patterns​. You can see which users have access to what sensitive files and how frequently they access them. You can even identify unusual behavior like a user suddenly accessing a trove of confidential data. This is invaluable for both governance and incident response. It means you have complete context around sensitive data: not just the content and classification, but also who owns it, who is using it, and how it's being used. If an insider threat or a compromised account is a concern, these insights can quickly surface suspicious access to sensitive information.

Notably, Rubrik provides this user-data mapping without requiring any additional agents or monitoring tools-it leverages existing audit logs and its own data index​. For governance, this helps enforce principles of least privilege, as you can identify cases where users have access to data they shouldn't, and then adjust permissions accordingly.

Another area where Rubrik shines is in streamlining audit and incident response workflows. Because Rubrik keeps an indexed record of sensitive data across time (thanks to its analysis of backup snapshots), it effectively maintains a historical ledger of where sensitive data was and how it was labeled or exposed at any point. In the event of an incident-a ransomware attack, say, or a data breach-one of the first questions is "What data was affected and was any of it sensitive or regulated?"

With Rubrik, you can answer that quickly. The system can show if any files compromised during an attack contained sensitive data and, if so, of what type​. For example, if malware encrypted a user's OneDrive, Rubrik could identify which of those files had personal data vs. which were harmless. This greatly aids incident response by focusing remediation and notification efforts on the truly critical data.

In fact, Rubrik's platform allows you to simulate this scenario: you can pick a set of files (or an entire OneDrive or mailbox) and see the sensitive data classification of that content, essentially performing an "impact assessment" of a breach in minutes. One Rubrik webinar demonstrated how you could determine if files exfiltrated or encrypted in an attack contained PII, PCI, or HIPAA data, and then perform targeted recovery of just those files​. This capability means when the worst happens, you have the tools to respond surgically: you know exactly what risk is posed by the incident and can invoke the appropriate recovery or breach response plans (like notifying regulators if, say, GDPR data was involved).

Traditional DSPM point solutions might alert you to sensitive data, but they don't integrate with recovery workflows. Rubrik does. You can go from risk identification to recovery in one swoop. For example, after identifying that certain files were improperly exposed, you can use Rubrik to restore previous versions of those files (before they were shared) or to a secure location for forensics, thereby closing the loop between detection and remediation.