In this blog series, I’ll be covering Microsoft Purview, starting with an introduction and then exploring the features Microsoft Purview has to offer in further posts.
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Why Microsoft Purview?
Microsoft Purview is a comprehensive set of tools designed to help organisations govern, protect, and manage their data across various platforms and environments. It provides a unified platform for data governance, security, and compliance, making it easier to manage data and meet regulatory requirements, wherever the data is stored.
Data often moves across boundaries and is shared with external partners or accessed on personal devices. Ensuring consistent security is key. Relying on multiple tools can lead to inefficiencies and gaps. To understand where critical data resides often requires a comprehensive review across on-premises and cloud environments.
Data is being created, stored, and shared at unprecedented rates. With increasing regulation and complexity, understanding how to secure and manage data effectively is more important than ever. One of the biggest challenges organisations face is becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume and complexity of managing data. It can be difficult to keep track of what data is out there and ensure it’s all properly protected throughout its lifecycle.
By 2025, it’s estimated that the world will produce up to 175 zettabytes of data, a tenfold increase from 2016. This rapid growth brings new challenges for organisations trying to manage a wide range of data types, including emails, documents, instant messages, videos, and images. Generative AI adds further complexity by introducing new layers of data and risks like privacy concerns and misinformation.
As data grows, so do the demands for protecting it. The need for strong controls around sensitive data is more critical than ever. Without a robust data management strategy, organisations risk financial penalties, reputational damage, and loss of customer trust.
Managing and protecting data is a growing challenge. Research highlights that:
- 88% of organisations lack confidence in their ability to detect or prevent sensitive data loss.
- More than 80% of corporate data remains “dark”, meaning it isn’t classified, protected, or governed.
- Protecting and governing sensitive data is one of the biggest challenges for compliance with regulations.
- As the environment grows more complex, so do the risks of data breaches and non-compliance.
This is where Microsoft Purview can help. This service provides organisations the ability to configure features such as, but not limited to, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), encryption of sensitive data, and insider risk management. According to research by Microsoft in 2023, 20% of data breaches were due to internal actors, costing businesses an average of $7.5 million annually.
Utilising Microsoft Purview offers a unified approach ensuring consistent classification, labeling, and protection of sensitive data, no matter where it resides. Microsoft Purview can be configured to provide a bird’s eye view of an organisation’s entire data landscape, helping them discover, classify, and manage their data with ease. This data could reside in a number of locations including Software As a Service applications (such as Dropbox, Salesforce), Azure, Microsoft 365, AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud, on-premises and more.
Another useful feature offered by Microsoft Purview is Information barriers. Information Barriers is a tool that helps you control communication and collaboration between different groups of people in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. It’s often used in industries with strict regulations to prevent conflicts of interest and to keep sensitive information secure between different departments inside an organisation.
There is more! Microsoft Purview Privileged Access Management (PAM) helps organisations control who can perform important admin tasks in Office 365. It protects your organisation from breaches by making sure only the right people have access to sensitive data or critical settings, and only when they need it. User’s must request temporary access to perform special tasks, which is approved through a specific process. This way, users get just enough access to do their job without risking the security of sensitive information.
Furthermore, Microsoft Purview can be configured to scan your data, provide a data map and identify and secure sensitive data which you may not be protecting. Microsoft Purview can provide you with the insights your organisation requires, not only helping identify and protecting your data, but providing insights on how that data is used.
Microsoft Purview can also assist your compliance and risk teams by providing tools to audit your data and whether you’re meeting compliance standards. The service also offers tools you can use in the event of a legal issue, known as eDiscovery. These useful insights are provided via an easy to understand reporting dashboard.
Microsoft Purview is structured into three pain pillars, these include Data Security, Data Governance and Risk & Compliance. These pillars combined provide organisations with a powerful platform for governing and securing data across the entire data estate. More info on the three pillars can be found at the following Microsoft Learn link, Learn about Microsoft Purview | Microsoft Learn.
I hope you have a basic understanding on what Microsoft Purview has to offer. I’ll explore the Microsoft Purview portal and features in further detail in this blog post series so stay tuned and don’t forget to subscribe, so you don’t miss the latest posts.
See you at the next one 🙂
