Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Ben Appleby

Jason Craig Nelson

Ning Xu

Anupama Janardhan

Churli Su

Wenjie Liang

Binyan Chen

Karissa C Larson

John Deters

Hosted services provided by service provider tenants to their users are an increasingly common software usage model. The usage of such services and handling of data may be subject to regulatory, legal, and industry-based rules, where different rules may be applicable depending on the particular service, handled data, and organization type, for example. Embodiments are directed to providing intelligence and analysis driven security and compliance suggestions for hosted services to reduce the burden on tenant administrators to determine and implement applicable policies and rules. Claims are directed to determination of a suggestion based on an analysis of a tenant's service environment, presentation of the suggestion along with analysis results and a prompt to confirm implementation of the suggestion, and upon receiving confirmation, presentation of an option to customize the suggestion by modifying settings suggested based on analysis results. The suggestion may be a policy, organization, policy customization, or organization customization.

Intelligence and analysis driven security and compliance recommendations

A hybrid configuration engine and associated method for reducing the complexity and burden of configuring rich coexistence between an on-premise solution and a cloud-based solution is described herein and illustrated in the accompanying figures. The hybrid configuration engine determines the current state of the on-premise solution and the cloud-based solution and learns the desired configuration state. After obtaining the current and desired configuration state information, the hybrid configuration engine determines and automatically performs steps to reach the desired configuration state. Finally, the hybrid configuration engine provides instructions describing the manual steps needed to reach the desired configuration state.

Hybrid configuration engine

Real time pivoting on data to model governance properties is provided. A data explorer module of a security and compliance service may analyze data, metadata, and activities associated with a tenant or a hosted service to understand the data, identify uncategorized data, and determine applicable policies and/or remediation actions in case of sensitive data that may need protection. The data may be stored and managed by a data insights platform which may enable query-based analyses on correlated, multi-stage evaluated data. Thus, the data may be analyzed, additionally, considering metadata, activities associated with the data, etc. In addition to the data, metadata, and activities, the data explorer module may receive information associated with existing classifications, properties, access, and applied policies. Upon evaluation of the data based on the received/stored factors, the data explores module may identify the data and determine applicable policies or actions.

Real time pivoting on data to model governance properties

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Ben Appleby