Introducing predefined policies in app governance

We're excited to announce the general availability of predefined policies in the app governance add-on for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. This first set of out-of-box policies represents our commitment to simplifying the entire app governance experience. The predefined policies will detect apps with anomalous and potentially malicious characteristics. We will continue to expand the set of predefined policies, further reducing the need to create manual policies and help streamline deployment. 

Why are predefined policies important? 

App governance currently provides a rich set of policy conditions. They do, however, require time and resources to sort out so admins can create the right policies for your organization. Predefined policies empower admins to focus on critical activities needed to keep their organization secure and compliant, not on the policy creation process itself. 

You’re still in control 

While the predefined policies are on by default and are designed for minimal maintenance, you will be able to: 

• Quickly find and review predefined policies in your list of policies 
• Activate or deactivate each policy individually 
• Set each policy to block apps 
• Exclude apps from the policy 

Other capabilities added as part of this release 

• Exclusion lists: Customers can now set policies to cover all apps except for specific apps. They can apply this scoping option to their existing custom policies as well as the predefined policies. 

• Correlation to Microsoft 365 Defender incidents: All app governance alerts are now correlated by Microsoft 365 Defender to generate incidents. 

• Simplified policy configuration: Customers can modify the predefined policies even faster using a new contextual flyout menu. 

Get started with app governance 

App governance is an add-on to Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps that provides enhanced visibility and control over cloud apps that access Microsoft 365. It sifts through these apps to identify not only attributes and behavior that are malicious, but also characteristics that mark significant sources of risk. 

Try app governance for free for 90 days 

- App governance team