Integrating seamlessly into the Microsoft 365 environment, Copilot is the perfect companion to an SMB’s existing Microsoft productivity suite. When configured and used correctly, Copilot is an extremely useful tool, allowing users to carry out key business tasks with ease. Employees can ask Copilot to find crucial files quickly, take meeting notes, draft emails, generate ideas, and much more.
As an MSP, your customers will soon be asking you to help them set up and get the most out of Copilot. However, Copilot is not secure by default. You need to help your customers use Copilot securely, safeguarding their data from internal or external exploitation.
Copilot presents a significant security risk for businesses: it forms its responses by drawing on a company’s internal data. If you haven’t put proper data access controls in place, then anyone within the business could potentially access sensitive data. If the company then faced a security breach, this data could be exploited and used as the basis for blackmail. This means that using Copilot automatically opens a business to both internal and external security threats.
Before you can transition your customers to Copilot, you need to ensure that they have proper data governance in place and a strengthened Microsoft 365 security posture.
But it’s not all bad news. Copilot does have one particular security benefit over other AI tools on the market as it is not at risk of being used for shadow AI.
Shadow AI is the unauthorized use of AI tools or applications within a business. Essentially, when employees use unapproved AI platforms to assist their work, they could input sensitive data, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information without the company being aware. Often, employees do not think about the potential repercussions of doing this and if the data input is unauthorized, the company cannot provide guidance. This could cause problems down the line.
By comparison, Copilot is an isolated instance of AI per-business. This means that your customers don’t need to worry about their data being leaked to shadow AI. If your customers want to use AI tools within their organization, Copilot is actually the more secure choice.
Before assisting any customer with Copilot adoption, you must ensure that their data is protected and their overall security posture is robust. You can leverage the security tools in Microsoft 365 Business Premium to help secure their environments.
As Copilot uses Microsoft 365 to inform its answers, you need to ensure that your customers’ data is centralized, organized, and well structured. Audit your customer’s data, and remove anything inaccurate or redundant, before migrating everything relevant to Microsoft 365. You should also ensure that all data is properly classified and labelled.
Help your customers to define clear purposes, rules, and role assignments for each workspace within Microsoft 365 and configure site access appropriately. Finally, strengthen data access policies by assessing data permissions and applying sensitivity labels and Conditional Access policies to protect confidential data.
You need to ensure that your customers’ Microsoft 365 environments are properly secured to provide an additional layer of security in the event of a data breach. Carry out an audit of their Microsoft 365 security policies and ensure they are aligned with your best practice baseline standards. You should then carry out a risk assessment to uncover any potential areas of vulnerability.
Moving forward, ensure that you continually monitor for vulnerabilities or policy configuration drift so you can proactively remediate issues before they become problematic.
Before rolling out Copilot at scale, you can run a pilot test to ensure that the data governance and security policies you have implemented are effective. To do this, create a limited list of sites that Copilot should only see during the pilot test and design company specific prompts to test potential data leakage of sensitive information.
Want to learn more about how to secure and productize Copilot? Download our Copilot readiness eBook to discover how to introduce strategic AI roadmaps into your service offering.