Microsoft 365 Copilot is on the minds of a lot of IT Professionals right now, with many contemplating adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot into their M365 environment imminently.

IT Professionals need to be confident Microsoft Copilot can be run with the knowledge users only have access to information they are permitted to access with the Microsoft 365 tenancy.

One of the biggest concerns of Microsoft CoPilot is the potential for internal breaches, an example could be, an employee accessing salary and personal information of other staff members.

PMD Data Solutions have put together a quick step by step guide to best practice BEFORE you go full throttle into adopting Copilot.

1. First step is to identify any overshared or unprotected sensitive information. The last thing you want is for sensitive information such as addresses or even payrolls to be accessible to people it shouldn’t be. A great tool to identify the items and save you hours or even days of checking each folder is AvePoint’s Insights tool.
    
2. Next up you need to clean up your permissions and enforce policies to secure your data whilst using Copilot. Using your insights, you identified in step one, you’ll now be able to prevent unauthorised access to your data. Although this can be done impenitently on each file/item, the AvePoint Policies Tool enables you to automatically apply the necessary security rules to your Teams, Groups, Sites, and OneDrive, or your entire Microsoft 365 tenant if needed.
    
3. Finally, once you have adopted Copilot, you need to ensure a management framework is in place to handle to rapid pace that your data will grow. AvePoint Cloud Governance helps organizations establish a governance framework for Microsoft 365. It automates the delivery of certain IT services, such as provisioning Teams, Sites, and Groups or application of conditional permissions and settings, ensuring content is created and maintained in accordance with your governance policies. By implementing an extensible Microsoft 365 governance strategy, AvePoint Cloud Governance offers tighter control of Microsoft 365 Copilot without any need for end-user or IT intervention, so content is managed in a secure and efficient manner.
    
4. This works well alongside automate content lifecycle management with AvePoint Opus to keep data clean and your storage costs low.

To discuss and arrange free demos, send our team an email at sales@pmddatsolutions.co.uk