Microsoft has extended its Data Loss Prevention service to SharePoint Online and One Drive for Business. Office 365 has previously had DLP for Exchange Online and Outlook.
Note also that this is only available in Office 365 – it is not available on premise.
Data Loss Prevention provides the ability for users to search for sensitive content within the eDiscovery Center. A good example of using DLP is creating a search that finds matches for documents that have credit card numbers in them or social security numbers.
The DLP tools provide 51 sensitive information types that can be used to flag documents. If you review the list, you can see Microsoft has implemented a few international standards such as Australia Driver’s License Number, Canada Health Service Number, etc. as well as US standards. You can also define your own DLP types.
The current version of DLP only allows you to run a report and export the list of documents. It does not automatically apply a policy to remedy the situation such as changing the offending documents permissions or deleting the documents. This type of functionality will be implemented in future releases