Students and employees use smartphones and tablets to create and access data 24×7. This creates an opportunity for a flexible and efficient user experience. But how do you protect the data on all those endpoints?

Enter Endpoint Manager and App Protection policies. When applied correctly, data becomes accessible and protected on all approved devices enabling Teams collaboration, Outlook email, and Power Automate automation (to name a few). IT admins, let’s rid your worry of data protection and let Endpoint Manager take on that anxiety. Don’t worry – there’s an Azure prescription to cure that!

When included in an App Protection policy, an approved app is entitled to access school and work data only after a verification process ensures appropriate security is in place on the device. Data living within the protected app ecosystem is free to be created and exchanged amongst the approved protected apps. As the data flows between people creating it, devices and apps accessing it, and people consuming it, encryption, compliance policies, and device security keep protected data in the ecosystem and infectious bad actors out.

Think of a Microsoft 365 tenant like an ecosystem where biotic components (employees and students) and abiotic elements (Azure, Microsoft Data Centers,

M365) are linked together through data. We create data, apps facilitate the use of data and M365 is where the data lives. App protection policies create the appropriate balance in the data ecosystem between access (productivity) and restrictions (security). When this balance is achieved, the ecosystem is productive, efficient, secure, and enables a positive end-user experience—introducing data ecosystem homeostasis. In this state, end-user support issues are reduced, and an employee’s ability to support the organization’s mission is increased. Data protected the whole time.

Nature reaches homeostasis in its “condition of optimal functioning” and when its “equilibrium is maintained by many regulatory mechanisms.” App protection policies are the regulatory mechanism acting within the M365 app and data ecosystem that maintain equilibrium. Remember our talk about compliance policies? App protection policies work hand in hand to protect access to data when a device is out of compliance by revoking the device from data access. Sorry jailbroken iOS, we don’t take kindly to your type in our data ecosystem — data revoked!

Now more than ever is the time to use Endpoint Manager to bring homeostasis to your organization’s M365 data ecosystem. Let us help you strike a balance between accessibility and security to enable your organization to do what it does best, support your mission and create M365 data!

C2 is a Microsoft Gold partner specializing in cloud solutions, digital services, and managed support solutions celebrating our 28th year in business.