Classification labelling of information will become mandatory at our providers from the week of Monday, 29 September, 2025.
These labels let you classify and protect documents and emails, based on their confidentiality.
To help prevent accidental sharing of this information, we have enabled a Sensitivity Labelling feature within Office 365. We encourage staff to begin labelling any documents with the appropriate sensitivity label based on our Unitec Information Classification Standard.
You can also find further information on how to apply the label to your documents, along with storage, sharing, transport, archive and disposal of information here.
These labels allow for further safeguards and checks to be put in place when sharing documents outside of our organisation, printing or copying to external devices. This helps prevent accidentally sharing sensitive or restricted information to someone who shouldn’t have access to it.
With the increased availability of AI assistants like Microsoft 365 Copilot, you’re giving a tool the ability to:
- Search through your documents, emails, Teams chats, and SharePoint files.
- Summarise, rewrite, or cross-reference information from multiple places.
Without sensitivity labels, Copilot could accidentally:
- Surface confidential reports in response to a general question.
- Pull confidential HR data into a presentation.
- Include sensitive client information in an email draft — all because the AI can’t tell “safe” from “restricted” unless the content is clearly tagged.
With sensitivity labels in place:
- Copilot respects the permissions tied to each label.
- If you have access to a “Sensitive” or “Restricted” document, Copilot won’t read or summarise it for you.
AI search and summarisation stay within your intended data boundaries.
Information Classification Controls
*Restricted is a higher information classification that is technically a National Security classification, but we would be using it in a different context. Its use is reserved for the most secure information internally
Labelling your documents in this way allows us to better understand and monitor what type of information is contained in files across our network and set access restrictions as appropriate. For particularly sensitive information, we are then able to put additional controls in place to prevent the accidental sharing or misuse of this information.
We encourage you to start familiarising yourself with the application of classification labels, and if you have any questions, please contact your manager or the Service Desk on itsupport@unitec.ac.nz.