Configuring and publishing auto-apply label policies- Microsoft SC-400 Certification
By Isabella Morgan / June 10, 2022 / No Comments / IBM and Microsoft Exams
The final type of retention policy we will be covering in this chapter is the auto-label policy. Much like the label policy covered in the last topic, this is created by issuing a label where we define our retention settings, but instead of publishing the label to our users, we let the policy look for sensitive data in our Microsoft 365 tenant and auto-apply the label to said information.
Looking back at the creation of a retention label from step 7, we will see Figure 10.23 in front of us:

Figure 10.23 – Selecting the Auto-apply this label to a specific type of content option to create your auto-label policy
To get started, we need to follow the steps provided in the last walk-through from 1 to 7, where we will make a different choice to create our auto-label policy:
- Select the Auto-apply this label to a specific type of content option, where we can select a sensitive information type created in Chapter 3, Creating and Managing Sensitive Information Types.
- This will bring us to Figure 10.24, where we will fill in the basic information regarding our auto-labeling policy:

Figure 10.24 – The basic information relating to the auto-labeling policy
- On the next page, we can choose what we want our auto-labeling policy to apply to. We have covered these earlier in the book, where we have created or worked with sensitive information types, regular expressions, or trainable classifiers:
a. Apply label to content that contains sensitive info
b. Apply label to content that contains specific words or phrases, or properties
c. Apply label to content that matches a trainable classifier:

Figure 10.25 – Showing the options in terms of content to apply the auto-labeling policy to
- To keep it somewhat streamlined to what we looked at in the chapters about data loss prevention (DLP) and endpoint DLP, we are going to choose the Financial category and the U.K. Financial Data sensitive information type:

Figure 10.26 – Showing the options for sensitive information types on the auto-labeling policy
- The next page allows us to adjust the confidence and instance count of each sensitive information type in U.K. Financial Data. We are not going to alter these in this demonstration, but if you were to change this, it would be able to identify with granularity, just as the chapter on data loss prevention described.
- When it comes to location, the same settings apply as with other retention labels, sensitive information types and trainable classifiers, and others. We simply choose which workload this auto-labeling policy will be applied to. If necessary, we could alter this policy to include specified individuals, sites, or accounts, or exclude specified individuals, sites, or accounts. The choices are as follows:
a. Exchange email
b. SharePoint sites
c. OneDrive accounts
d. Microsoft 365 Groups
- The second to last page allows us to choose which label we are going to publish for this policy. Given that we only have the one in the demo environment, the choice is rather straightforward:

Figure 10.27 – Choosing the label for which we are going to issue an auto-labeling policy
- On the last page, as with the other labels or policies we have created, we have an option to review our settings and finally submit the changes to our Microsoft 365 tenant:

Figure 10.28 – Lastly, reviewing the settings for the auto-labeling policy prior to creation
- And with that, we have successfully created a retention policy, a retention label policy, and an auto-labeling policy in our tenant, making sure that no sensitive information accidentally or maliciously gets deleted:

Figure 10.29 – Showing the progress of the labels and policies created
This section has been about auto-labeling policies, the last topic of this chapter.
Summary
This chapter has been all about retention labels and the different retention policies available in the Microsoft 365 tenant. We learned about creating and applying retention labels, configuring and publishing auto-apply label policies, and creating and applying retention label policies. In the following chapter, we will investigate the topic of managing data retention in Microsoft 365.