How can Microsoft Purview help my Business?
Microsoft Purview, formerly known as Microsoft 365 Compliance and Azure Purview is a comprehensive suite of solutions to help organisations:
- Gain visibility into data assets.
- Enable access to data, security, and risk solutions.
- Safeguard and manage sensitive data across clouds, apps, and endpoints.
- Manage end-to-end data risks and regulatory compliance.
Microsoft Purview includes Security, Risk and Compliance solutions that support Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange included in Microsoft 365.
Microsoft 365 Solutions Available:
- Purview Information Protection – discover, classify, and protect sensitive information wherever it lives or travels.
- Discover and identify sensitive information - Detect and understand your sensitive information, such as personal data, across a variety of locations including devices, apps, cloud services, and on-premises.
- Classify and protect - Manually or automatically apply sensitivity labels to files. Easily configure data security actions, such as encryption, digital rights management (DRM), access restrictions, and visual markings.
- Monitor and remediate- View trends in your sensitive data landscape. Monitor policy violations and risky behaviour.
- Purview Data Loss Prevention - apply DLP policies to identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive items across:
- Microsoft 365 services such as Teams, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Power BI as well as Office applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
- Windows 10, Windows 11, and macOS (three latest released versions) endpoints.
- Non-Microsoft cloud apps, on-premises file shares and on-premises SharePoint.
- Purview Data Lifecycle Management and Records Management - govern your data for compliance or regulatory requirements and ensure you keep what you need and delete what you don’t:
- Set retention policies/labels for email, documents, Teams and Viva Engage.
- Retain Inactive and Archive mailboxes.
- Advanced management for retention labels with File Plan.
- Purview Insider Risk Management – apply policies to detect, investigate, and mitigate internal risks such as:
- Leaks of sensitive data, data spillage and confidentiality violations.
- Intellectual property (IP) theft.
- Regulatory compliance violations.
- Purview Communication Compliance – helps minimise communication risks by helping to detect, capture, and act on potentially inappropriate messages in your organisation. Monitor text and image-based messages in Microsoft and third-party apps:
- Teams, Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, Viva Engage and Outlook.
- 3rd parties – WhatsApp, RingCentral, Zoom, Android etc.
- Purview Information Barriers – apply IB policies to allow or prevent communication and collaboration between groups and users for the following example scenarios:
- Finance personnel working on confidential company information shouldn't communicate or share files with certain groups within their organisation.
- An internal team with trade secret material shouldn't call or chat online with users in certain groups within their organisation.
- A SharePoint site for group A shouldn't be shared or accessed by anyone outside of Group A.
- Purview Audit – use audit log to respond to security events, forensic investigations, internal investigations, and compliance obligations. Typical activities include:
- Finding IP address of the computer used to access a compromised account.
- Determine who set up email forwarding, deleted email items or created rule for a mailbox.
- Review Teams Chat and Channel activities as well as SharePoint and OneDrive sharing activities.
- Purview eDiscovery - identify and deliver electronic information that can be used as evidence in legal cases:
- Search for content in Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and Viva Engage teams.
- Case management and Legal Hold.
- Custodian management.
- Purview Compliance Manager - stay ahead of legal requirements whilst simplifying compliance and reducing risk:
- Use pre-built assessments for common industry standard and regulations i.e. PCI DSS, CIS benchmarks, Data Protection Act, GDPR etc.
- Access guidance to follow standards and regulations to increase compliance score.
- Integrate with Defender for Cloud to manage compliance in multi-cloud environments – GCP/AWS.
- Microsoft Purview Privileged Access Management - protect your organisation from breaches and meet compliance best practices by:
- Provide just-in-time access to critical resources.
- Analyse unusual, privileged activity that might be harmful to your organisation
- Capture privileged account events for compliance audits.
Microsoft Purview formerly Azure Purview includes Data Governance solutions that help you manage data services across your on-premises, multi-cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) estate. That includes Azure storage services, Power BI, databases like SQL or Hive, file services like Amazon S3, and many more.
These governance solutions are accessible through the Microsoft Purview Governance portal, providing tools enabling your organisation to:
- Create an up-to-date map of your entire data estate that includes data classification and end-to-end lineage.
- Identify where sensitive data is stored in your estate.
- Create a secure environment for data consumers to find valuable data.
- Generate insights about how your data is stored and used.
Azure Solutions Available:
Microsoft Purview Data Map is where it all begins, allowing you to automate and manage metadata from a multitude of sources. Purpose-built apps have been created to suite a variety of personas:
Data consumers and producers would use Microsoft Purview Data Catalog and Microsoft Purview Data Sharing that provide environments for data discovery and access management helping them find trusted data sources and enabling secure sharing of data internally and externally.
Data officers and governance stakeholders would typically use Microsoft Purview Data Estate Insights and Microsoft Purview Data Policy apps. Data Estate Insights offers a bird’s eye view to discover what data you have, where it exists whilst highlighting any governance gaps. Data Policy helps manage access to data sources allowing organisations to grant access only to what is needed via fine-grained policies.
Licensing Microsoft Purview
Security, Risk and Compliance solutions are available to Microsoft 365 E5 subscribers however some features are available already in O365 E and SMB Business subscriptions i.e. eDiscovery Standard, Audit Standard, Information Protection for Microsoft 365, Data Loss Prevention for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business and Compliance Manager.
Customers can mix and match licensing to accommodate compliancy requirements and don’t necessarily need to upgrade to Microsoft 365 E5 to benefit from the enhanced features included. For example, add-ons are available for:
- Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance
- Microsoft 365 E5 Info Protection and Governance
- Microsoft 365 E5 Insider Risk Management
- Microsoft 365 E5 eDiscovery and Audit
Please be mindful that services can be tenant-level - an online service that is activated in part or in full for all users in the tenant (standalone license and/or as part of a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 plan). Every user intended to benefit from a service must be licensed.
Purview Data Governance solutions are available to buy via an Azure subscription and can vary depending on duration of scans (includes metadata extraction and classification), ingestion jobs and API calls.
Summary
Microsoft Purview is a unified data governance service that helps businesses manage and govern their data across on-premises, multicloud, and SaaS environments. Providing tools for data security, risk management, and compliance. This service aims to provide visibility into data, safeguard sensitive information throughout its lifecycle, and offer comprehensive governance to manage data-related risks and regulatory requirements.
Learn about Microsoft Purview | Microsoft Learn
Microsoft Purview—Data Protection Solutions | Microsoft Security
Unified Data Governance with Microsoft Purview | Microsoft Azure
I hope this blog post was helpful! If you have any questions about Microsoft Purview, please reach out to your Account Manager.