Microsoft 365 Admin Centers and Data Policies

The primary configuration interface for Microsoft 365, enabling administrators to manage user accounts, purchase subscriptions, and access other administrative interfaces.

A web portal that provides administrative access to Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Dynamics 365 environments, including managing environments, users, and settings.

This admin center for Power BI provides tools to manage users, audit logs, and connect to other admin centers.

The All Admin Centers page in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Microsoft is gradually shifting functions from old admin centers like Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dynamics 365 into the Power Platform admin center.

As of the second edition of this book, the Power Apps and Power Automate links on the All Admin Centers page lead to the Power Platform admin center.

The Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dynamics 365 admin centers were deprecated by Microsoft in June 2020.

If you can't find a specific function in the deprecated admin centers, the first place to look for it would be the Power Platform admin center.

A process that records specific user activities within a system, storing them in a log file. This log file can be accessed by administrators to monitor data access, security role changes, entity and field modifications, sharing privilege adjustments, and the timestamps and locations of updates.

A detailed record of actions taken within a system, including who performed the action, what they did, and when it occurred. This is valuable for troubleshooting, security analysis, and compliance purposes.

A powerful feature in business applications that allows administrators to record and review user actions within the system, promoting accountability and enabling security analysis.

The ability to view and analyze the information stored in the audit log, providing insights into system usage and potentially identifying security breaches or irregularities.

The location in a Power Platform environment where administrators can manage audit settings and access audit logs, providing a central hub for system security monitoring.

Data loss prevention (DLP) policies are rules that classify connectors based on their data sensitivity level.

Connectors classified as "Non-business" access non-sensitive data and cannot share data with "Business" connectors.

Connectors classified as "Business" access sensitive data and can only share data with other "Business" connectors.

Connectors classified as "Blocked" are prohibited from being used within the environment.

Administrators can assign a DLP policy to an entire tenancy or specific environments within the tenancy using scope options.

The Service Trust Portal (STP) is a central repository of information about Microsoft's compliance with various standards and regulations.

The STP provides independent audit reports that evaluate Microsoft's cloud services against standards like ISO, SOC, NIST, FedRAMP, and GDPR.

The STP's "Compliance Manager" tool assesses an organization's compliance posture based on published standards and regulations.

Compliance Manager assesses an organization's compliance based on the capabilities of Microsoft cloud services and how the organization uses them.

Compliance Manager displays a dashboard with tiles representing assessments of various cloud services against specific standards.

Selecting a Compliance Manager tile displays detailed information about a cloud service assessment, including individual controls and compliance scores.

Each control in a Compliance Manager assessment lists who tested it, when, and the individual compliance score value.

Auditing is another way to monitor compliance with data access regulations.

Auditing helps ensure that data access policies are followed and provides evidence of compliance.