Finding Sensitive Data in Microsoft OneNote

Ground Labs’ Enterprise Recon now supports sensitive data discovery for Microsoft OneNote.

Microsoft’s OneNote is a digital note-taking app packaged with Microsoft 365. It supports image capture, attachments and collaboration. Such tools can be very useful to individuals and teams, but they present a challenge when it comes to managing sensitive data.

The free-text, unstructured nature of the application makes it very hard to control the type of information people keep in it. From text notes, screenshots and file attachments, OneNote is the sensitive data store organizations don’t know they have.

Among the greatest risks to data security is uncontrolled proliferation of data, both internally and externally. The use of OneNote as a collaboration tool with internal and external parties, coupled with the limited control organizations have over the information captured and retained within it, makes the tool a data security risk for many businesses.

To manage this risk and for organizations looking to meet local and cross-border privacy legislation, as well as industry-recognized security standards such as PCI DSS, it’s important they understand where all their sensitive data resides. This means investigating all possible locations of this data, including those outside of any formal business process.

As well as supporting data discovery and remediation for the widest range of platforms and databases, Enterprise Recon 2.8.0 now offers data discovery scanning of OneNote notebooks for Microsoft 365 licensed products.

Enterprise Recon can be configured to scan specific groups, users, notebook folders, notebooks, sections or pages. It is also possible to scan all OneNote notebooks within a domain.

Using the 300+ pre-packaged data types within Enterprise Recon PII or Pro editions, organizations can identify and mark the locations of sensitive and personal data in OneNote notebooks and file attachments. The delegated remediation offered in the Pro edition enables mitigation tasks to be assigned to responsible individuals.

To find how data discovery supports effective data management, download our complimentary article Data Discovery is Part of the Equation.