"MYDATA Control Technologies” Office Add-ins

With MYDATA Office Add-ins, Fraunhofer IESE offers companies a simple and reliable tool for classifying Microsoft Office documents.

The disclosure of sensitive information is a constant threat to companies and can have drastic financial consequences. Often, however, this does not happen as a result of targeted technical attacks, but rather through carelessness and/or missing information about the confidentiality level of documents. In practice, for example, it happens time and again that employees send internal documents to external recipients even though they contain confidential information.

Fraunhofer IESE’s MYDATA Office Add-ins have been developed to prevent such scenarios by simplifying and unifying the information classification process. This not only promotes compliance, but also helps to avoid data loss due to unintentional release of confidential documents.

Support is provided for the classification of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, as is protection when sending documents via Microsoft Outlook, starting with Microsoft Office 2016.

Challenges

• Creation of security awareness and compliance in the company
• Consistent and correct classification of Microsoft Office documents
   

Contributions of Fraunhofer IESE

• Implementation of requirements of the Secrecy Protection Act for adequate secrecy and requirements from security standards such as ISO 27001
• Development of add-ins for Microsoft Office 2016 and newer
  • Classification of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files
  • Protection when sending documents via Microsoft Outlook
     

Goals / Results

• Licensable and individually customizable software product for direct use in companies