Lepide Blog: A Guide to IT Security, Compliance and IT Operations

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot and How Do You Deploy It Securely?

Craig Smilowitz

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Both small and large businesses are always looking for ways to improve their efficiency and get that competitive edge. One way to do this is to optimize the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that consume a large portion of day-to-day work.

Enter Microsoft 365 Copilot For organizations using Microsoft 365, combining your data in Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps with a powerful large language model (LLM) will elevate your workforce in output and productivity (at least, in theory). Let’s take a deeper look at Copilot and how you can deploy it securely.

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?

The AI-powered productivity tool Microsoft 365 Copilot gives users real-time intelligence to help them do jobs more quickly, improving their skills and productivity while also making their work experience better overall. Large language models (LLMs) are a class of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that employ data sets and deep learning techniques to comprehend, summarize, forecast, and create text. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams are just a few of the Microsoft 365 productivity products that Microsoft 365 Copilot works with.

Key Features of Microsoft 365 Copilot

Some of the key features of Microsoft 365 Copilot will be discussed in this section:

  1. Personalized Support: Personalized support is one of Microsoft 365 Copilot’s primary features. Over time, Copilot adjusts to the preferences and work style. It becomes a genuinely personalized and intuitive assistant by learning from your activities, analyzing data patterns, and tailoring its recommendations accordingly.
  2. Assistance in real-time: As you work, Copilot offers contextual recommendations to help you write emails, papers, and code more quickly. It saves time by anticipating your needs and providing relevant material.
  3. Collaboration: By offering insightful recommendations during team conversations, brainstorming sessions, and meetings, Copilot promotes smooth collaboration. It increases the overall efficacy of your workgroup by assisting you in locating pertinent data and insights.
  4. Automated Tasks: Copilot automates tedious chores like meeting scheduling, file organization, and report creation by identifying trends in your work. Your time is freed up, allowing you to focus on more strategic activities.
Lepide Guide for Microsoft 365 CopilotThis guide will list the steps security teams can take to ensure organizational readiness for Copilot before and after deployment. Download Whitepaper

Microsoft 365 Copilot Requirements

Below are several pre-requisites for using Microsoft 365 Copilot:

  1. Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 must be used by the company, and Copilot requires an additional payment.
  2. A minimum order of 300 seats is now required for Copilot memberships, per Microsoft.
  3. A working Microsoft Entra ID account is required of the users.
  4. Some of Microsoft 365 Copilot’s services, like file restoration and One Drive administration, necessitate a One Drive account.
  5. External access, guest access, team creation rights, and other Teams settings can be configured using the Microsoft Teams setup instructions found in the Microsoft 365 admin portal.
If you like this, you’ll love thisWhat is Microsoft Copilot?

How to Use Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Among many other tasks, Microsoft 365 Copilot may help with the development of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails, and notes. You can utilize Microsoft 365 Copilot to have the tedious tasks completed for you. Just enter a command, and Copilot will follow it, just like any other AI tool. In addition, Copilot may be used to analyze data in Microsoft Apps and carry out tasks like searching for patterns in particular data sets, analyzing data, creating new sheets and graphs based on it, and even explaining in Excel how it works and comes to those findings.

  1. Microsoft 365 Apps: Applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams collaborate with Copilot to assist users within their work environment. Office 365’s Copilot can be used with Word, Outlook, Excel, Teams, and Power, among other commonplace applications.
  2. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat: This is applicable to Microsoft Teams. You can write content with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, go over what you missed, and use open-ended prompts to receive answers to queries. This data is safely based on your job details.
  3. Microsoft Graph: Information about the connections between people, actions, and the data in your company is included in Microsoft Graph. Additional context from customer signals, such as data from emails, chats, papers, and meetings, is added to the prompt using the Microsoft Graph API.
  4. Semantic Index: The content in Microsoft Graph is used to create this index. The creation of contextually appropriate answers to user prompts will be aided by the semantic index. The organizations will be able to search through billions of vectors and get relevant results because of the semantic index.
If you like this, you’ll love thisMicrosoft 365 Copilot Security Concerns and Risks

How Microsoft 365 Copilot Works?

The architecture of Microsoft 365 Copilot is safe and adheres to Microsoft’s dedication to data security and privacy inside the company. You are completely in charge of what you must disclose to the copilot and how you wish to use the findings. This is compatible with the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and Outlook. It may be given natural language prompts and will produce summaries, recommendations, content, and much more.

There are two ways to integrate Copilot: as a stand-alone application called Business Chat and as an integrated component in the Microsoft 365 apps. With the help of the new app Business Chat, you can communicate with Copilot and complete tasks across all of your apps and data. You can ask it to make a presentation, send an email, set up a meeting, or provide your team with project updates. It will assist you to finish the process and create the content for you.

The procedure for using Microsoft 365 Copilot is as follows:

Copilot first gets an input command from a user in a program like Word or PowerPoint. Copilot pre-processes the command using a technique called grounding based on the command that was received. The command’s specificity to obtain pertinent and actionable responses in accordance with the task is enhanced by this grounding. Only data that a certain user already has access to is accessed by Copilot, for instance, through role-based access rules in Microsoft 365. Following receipt of the LLM’s response, Copilot post-processes it, comprising command generation, security, compliance and privacy evaluations, responsible AI checks, and additional grounding calls to Microsoft Graph. The user can examine and evaluate the response when Copilot sends it back to the app.

If you like this, you’ll love thisHow to Install and Set Up Copilot for Microsoft 365

How Does Lepide Help?

Before you deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot, your environment needs to be set up correctly. If you have any users with excessive permissions, or you have data open to all users through open shares, then your risk of sensitive data exposure or breaches goes through the roof with Copilot. With Lepide Data Security Platform, you can reduce your threat surface, and monitor the ongoing behavior of your users to ensure Copilot is being used safely and securely.

Do you want to Deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot securely in your organization? Schedule a demo with one of our engineers.