How do you make sure
agents don't run unchecked across your environment?
It starts with the right level of observability
across security, compliance, and IT,
insights that's tailored to each team's domain expertise,
yet shared across teams,
so issues can be identified early
and addressed quickly when something goes wrong.
This is where Agent 365 comes in
to bring together security and IT teams
so they can stay in control
through a unified control plane,
built to work with the Microsoft tools you already use.
Whether you're viewing agents
along with their configurations
and high-level activities in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center,
understanding agent activities
and protecting sensitive information with Microsoft Purview,
managing agent identities and permissions
to apps, data, and resources with Microsoft Entra,
or investigating and responding to incidents
in Microsoft Defender,
Agent 365 provides a common source of truth
for agent activity,
enabling teams to assess and respond to risks
from their own domain expertise
using the tools and workflows they know best.
Today is the first episode in a series
where we go deeper on using Agent 365
across your organization,
starting with protecting your sensitive data.
For example, if data isn't properly
classified and protected,
AI, which uses powerful semantic search,
can quickly surface information that was once hard to find,
leading to data loss.
At the same time,
it can potentially share it with the wrong people,
and related other risks can escalate quickly.
Microsoft Purview now extends the controls you have
for users in your organization to agents
so they stay aligned
with your organization's data security
and compliance requirements.
Let me show you how IT and data security teams
can work together using Agent 365.
Starting in Agent 365 in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
As an IT admin, I can see a comprehensive list
of agents in our organization.
I can manage agent deployment requests
to review the details for agent configurations
and even leverage built-in security defaults
for Agent 365 to quickly establish policy controls.
That said, as agents are used inside of your organization,
Microsoft Purview, as part of the Agent 365 control plane,
provides more granular controls
with deeper visibility over data security.
This includes rich AI
observability, protection, and compliance.
Right from Microsoft Purview,
I can see agents running in my organization
with the same left-to-right agent visibility
we saw in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
From Data Security Posture Management, or DSPM, for short,
I can find key agent metrics
and what's important for data security,
like which agents are active and their risk levels,
whether they're interacting with sensitive data,
in which ways, along with interaction trends.
I can also see if their activities are protected
with sufficient policy coverage.
Let me show you an example
of how this level of oversight and protection works,
starting from the end user perspective.
This is a custom, in-house-developed Zava supplier agent.
It's designed to review and summarize
purchase orders for clients.
Here, a member of the procurement team
asks the agent to review
a few linked purchase orders PDF files
and check for delays and impacts.
The reasoning agent gets to work almost immediately,
providing a summary for the linked files.
It then attempts to access a contract file
to figure out the contractual impacts of any delays.
Now, because the contract has a label
that the agent is not allowed to process,
it stops and says that it cannot access the information
contained in that file.
This is Microsoft Purview
enforcing least-privilege access in real time.
Next, our same user asks the agent
to email the summary to an external supplier.
The agent tries,
but Purview spots sensitive data in the message.
In fact, if we move to Outlook and open the message,
we can see that our sensitive information policies
have blocked the email from being sent.
Back in Teams, we can see that the same user
is attempting to use the agent to draft an email
that promises an exclusive gift incentive
to fast track the PO approval.
The agent stops again.
It recognizes the request
crosses ethical and compliance lines
and explains why to our user.
Importantly, behind the scenes,
Purview logs all activity as it happens
and flags the interaction for review.
In fact, let's switch perspectives
to the data security admin in the Purview portal
after these activities have taken place.
I'm back in DSPM under AI Observability
with a view of my running agents.
And on top of my list,
Purview has flagged the supplier agent as high risk.
Let's drill into it.
For that, I'm in insider risk management view
for this activity.
It maps out the sequence of events
that our user and agent attempted to carry out,
starting with sensitive file access in SharePoint,
including the contract I mentioned.
Then the DLP policy block,
which stopped the email summary
from being sent to the external supplier.
And, finally, the unethical behavior block
when a user attempted to offer a gift
in exchange for faster contract approval.
All these activities raise the risk level of the agent,
and each action is clearly outlined.
To get more detailed context about the agent's behavior,
I can view the activity timeline,
which links me directly into Activity Explorer in DSPM
to see other interactions with this agent.
It looks like there's a mix of benign activity
at the bottom of the list,
and the higher risk activities for our user are at the top.
All prompts and responses are evaluated
against compliance policies and classifiers,
and any matches are surfaced
using the same investigation and remediation workflows
you already use today.
In fact, you can find the details
for agent policy violations
across solutions in Microsoft Purview.
For example, if your focus is on communication compliance,
you can find the details for the agent interaction
that was flagged as unethical.
In this case, it matched
the gifts and entertainment condition.
And clicking in,
you can see related matches for other sources too.
And Purview Audit also captures every agent interaction,
which you'll find using an audit search.
Here we've searched across agent interactions
that occurred between
February 1st and March 1st for our agent,
and you can see the exportable details for each interaction,
including IP, user, agent, record, and activity details.
So when a regulator asks: "How did this happen?"
You can trace it instantly using Purview Audit.
Of course, with Agent 365 at the foundation,
everything is connected and integrated
across the control plane.
So now as an IT admin
working in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center,
I can see the agents running in our environment
filtered by high risk,
and there's our supplier agent.
In its details, under Security and Compliance,
I can see it has performed a few risky activities.
This is all signal
that has been pulled in from Microsoft Purview
as part of Agent 365.
From here, I can tune the agent configurations,
including its permissions,
or even block it all together from use.
AI agents move fast,
and without the right level of visibility
and guardrails in place,
they can easily access data they shouldn't overshare,
and even work against your company's ethics.
Agent 365 with Microsoft Purview
keeps your agents in line,
spots trouble before it happens,
and makes sure that actions are recorded.
To learn more, check out aka.ms/Agent365DataSecurity.
In the next episode of the series,
we'll explore Agent 365 with Microsoft Defender
to investigate and respond to security incidents
involving agentic activity.
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and thanks for watching.