How Microsoft Information Protection (AIP) protects data

Most of these blog posts are created from questions I receive from customers and participants in my Information Protection workshops, and this is no different. There are always questions on how data is protected, what kind of encryption is used, if Microsoft can read the data and so on, so I wanted to try to clarify some of these things here. This is intended for those of you who are new to AIP and encryption, and for deep dives into cryptography there are way better sources out there.