Admins can now manage RPA automations with ease using Data Loss Prevention for desktop flows (Preview)

We are seeing more and more business users start to adopt Power Automate desktop flows (RPA) to increase their day to day work efficiency, productivity and accuracy.

As organizations begin to grow and scale RPA it is critical to do so in a responsible way. To support the ability for enterprise admins to apply managements and controls over automations, we are happy to announce that data loss prevention (DLP) for desktop flows is now in preview. 

With this, similar to the previously existing Power Platform data policies, administrators can now define policies for automations and warn makers when they are creating RPA desktop flows that may go against their organizational governance rules.

Important

This capability is currently in preview for free. When this feature becomes generally available in 2022, it will be available for environments with premium accounts only.

Note

This feature will be rolling out to all cloud regions base on following schedule. Please check the table below to see when the feature will be fully enabled in your region.

Date Available in regions
11/1 Canada
11/30 Switzerland , Brazil
12/6 Asia, UK, Australia, Japan
12/9 Europe
12/15 US(NAM)
1/4 Government Community Cloud (GCC), Government Community Cloud – High (GCC High), Department of Defense (DoD), China regions

Data loss prevention for desktop flows is only available for versions of Power Automate Desktop 2.14.173.21294 or newer. If you are using an older version, please uninstall and update to the latest

If the users are not using the latest PAD, the local DLP enforcement will not be supported, but we will still run background jobs to validate all desktop flows once they were saved to the cloud.

Admin scenario: admin can create a DLP policy with desktop flows restrictions

Maker scenario – Maker with the latest PAD will not be able to debug, run or save desktop flows that violate the company DLP policies, neither could use it from a cloud flow.

To learn more details about DLP for desktop flows, please check https://aka.ms/DLP-Preview 

Please let us know your feedback so we can continue to improve this Preview feature.