In today’s technology-driven workplace, data plays a crucial role in every organisation, from driving strategic decision-making to enhancing customer experiences. However, with great power comes great responsibility. As the volume and complexity of data grows, so do the risks associated with its management. Threat actors are continually targeting and exploiting organisations for their sensitive data, making data security and governance not just a priority, but a necessity.
The consequences of inadequate data security can be severe. Data breaches can lead to substantial regulatory fines and reputable damage. Therefore, implementing robust data security measures and effective governance frameworks is crucial to protecting businesses.
In this blog we explore how Microsoft Purview can support organisations in their data security and governance, offering comprehensive solutions to manage and protect sensitive information, ensure compliance, and enhance overall data governance. By leveraging Microsoft Purview, businesses can streamline their data management processes, mitigate risks, and maintain trust with stakeholders. Read on to learn more.
What is Microsoft Purview?
Microsoft Purview is Microsoft’s data security solution set which is designed to help organisations safeguard their data assets. From advanced data classification and protection to regulatory compliance and risk management, Microsoft Purview provides a strong framework to secure sensitive information and ensure its proper use.Microsoft Purview is the fusion of legacy tools Azure Purview and Microsoft 365 compliance solutions, which together form a unified platform with the best in compliance and governance capabilities. The Microsoft Purview solutions address the security risk of fragmented data within an organisation, providing increased visibility across their entire data estate.
What is Included in Microsoft Purview?
The Microsoft Purview product set provides organisations with a powerful range of tools for integrated data security, data governance, and risk and compliance management. Uncover some of its tools below:
Audit: Help achieve regulatory compliance and support forensic investigations with the use of an events audit log and tailored retention policies.
Communication compliance: Ensure a safe and compliant working environment, with the identification of sensitive content that violates company policy.
Compliance manager: Streamlines complex regulatory requirements into specific, actionable steps to assist you in improving your score and monitoring progress.
Data lifecycle management: Meet your businesses legal and regulatory obligations by using this tool to classify and govern your organisation’s data at scale.
Data loss prevention: Protect sensitive and business-critical data from unauthorised access across applications, services, endpoints, and on-premises files.
Adaptive protection: The tool utilises Insider Risk Management machine learning to customise DLP controls based on user interactions with your organisation’s data, ensuring the most effective data protection policies.
eDiscovery: By utilising end-to-end workflows, eDiscovery allows you to discover and manage your data in one place, enabling efficient response to legal matters or internal investigations with intelligent capabilities that filter data to only what’s relevant.
Information protection: This tool enables users to discover, identify, classify, and protect sensitive data within your organisation by using sensitivity labels.
Insider risk management: Secure your business from insider risks, including data theft, data leaks and security policy violations.Unified data governance: This tool enhances data visibility across your multi-cloud and hybrid data estate, offering a comprehensive understanding of your entire data landscape.
Business Benefits of Microsoft Purview
Adopting Microsoft Purview offers a multitude of benefits for businesses, ranging from advanced data classification to enhanced regulatory compliance. Microsoft Purview equips organisations with the essential tools they need to protect and manage their data effectively. Below, we explore the specific business benefits Microsoft Purview offers.
Data Classification
Microsoft Purview provides advanced data classification and protection capabilities, enabling organisations to identify, label, and secure sensitive information across their entire data estate. This proactive approach reduces the risk of data breaches and unauthorised access, ensuring that critical data remains protected and always controlled, supporting the adoption of a zero-trust strategy.
Improved Data Governance
Microsoft Purview provides a unified platform for creating, enforcing, and monitoring data policies and standards. This ensures consistent data management practices across the organisation.
Regulatory Compliance
Navigating the complex landscape of data regulations can be challenging. Microsoft Purview streamlines compliance by offering tools to manage and monitor regulatory requirements. With built-in compliance assessments and reporting, businesses can ensure they meet standards such as GDPR, avoiding costly fines and legal complications.
Holistic View of Sensitive Data
Microsoft Purview offers comprehensive data cataloguing and lineage capabilities, providing organisations with a clear view of their data landscape. This unparalleled visibility enables businesses to understand where data resides, how it is used, and who has access to it. Increased visibility directly improves data control in an organisation and therefore helps in mitigating data security risks.
Risk Management
Through continuous monitoring and risk assessments, Microsoft Purview can help organisations identify and mitigate data risk before it escalates, ensuring a more data resilient environment.
Data Driven Insights
Using powerful data classification and analytics tools, Microsoft Purview enables organisations to gain valuable insights from their data. By understanding data usage patterns and identifying trends, businesses can use this information to informed decisions, optimise operations, and drive innovation.
Sharing of Data Without Duplications
Historically, organisations have shared data with internal teams or external users by creating data feeds, which require creating and maintaining data copy and refresh pipelines. Resulting in high data storage costs, data proliferation and a delay to time sensitive data.Microsoft’s Purview Data Sharing tool allows data providers to share data directly from Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and Azure Storage accounts, both within and between organisations. Enabling the sharing of data with users and partners without duplication and allows the centralised management of sharing activities within Microsoft Purview.
Complete Environment Protection
With Microsoft Purview, you do not need to invest in multiple solutions for different digital locations. Where some vendors offer governance solutions specifically for cloud-based data and others focus on on-premises storage, Microsoft Purview unifies these, providing comprehensive coverage across your entire infrastructure.
Reduce Cost
Microsoft Purview helps reduce costs by removing the need for manual custom data discovery and classification. As well as the cost of maintaining personal systems and Excel-based solutions.
With the solution you only pay for what you use, meaning it charges businesses on a per-user per-month basis and pricing is tailored towards your organisational requirements, so there is no obligation to pay for a licence that exceeds your users’ requirements.
Is Microsoft Purview Accessible with Microsoft E3 and E5 Licences?
The Microsoft tools available to your organisation will be dependent on your licence subscription type – either Microsoft E3 and E5.
In the case of Microsoft Purview, an E5 licence will include the vast majority of its tools, while an E3 licence offers a more limited selection of available tools.
It’s important to note that you can combine different Microsoft 365 plans in a single business account. For example, if your organisation has an E3 licence but needs more advanced security and compliance tools, you can add Microsoft E5 Security and Microsoft E5 Compliance as extra options to your E3 plan.
Another option is to mix and match standalone licences if Microsoft Purview includes a feature you want but is otherwise more than you need for your business.Access Microsoft’s comparison tool to get the most up-to-date detail on which Microsoft Purview tools are included with your licence.
How to Deploy Microsoft Purview
Implementing Microsoft Purview in an organisation involves both business operations and IT considerations. It is important to have a strategic plan established prior to its deployment to maximise Purviews benefits across the business.
A common challenge is end-user experience, so it is important to gain stakeholder buy in early in its deployment. Identify the data that should be protected, the data sources involved, the regulatory challenges at play, and the departments impacted. Once you have an in-depth understanding of these needs, it will make the deployment easier and user adoption more likely.
Microsoft advises against deploying Microsoft Purview in one large step. Instead, Microsoft recommends the approach of Crawl, Walk, Run for the deployment process of Purview. Purview makes this easy, with the providing businesses with the tools to completely control the scope of users, sites, and mailboxes, as well as which mode you roll out in.
For example, you can begin a Microsoft Purview deployment with Audit and Test modes, move to User Override mode, and then switch to Full Block mode when you are ready.
For further advice on best practices when deploying Purview, please see Microsoft’s Guide.
In Summary
In conclusion, Microsoft Purview offers a robust and comprehensive solution for data security, governance, and compliance in today’s increasingly data-driven landscape.
By unifying tools for data classification, risk management, and regulatory compliance, Microsoft Purview provides organisations with the tools to protect sensitive information, streamline operations, and navigate regulatory challenges effectively. With flexible licensing options, Purview ensures you have the right tools for your business’s requirements.
How CWSI Can Help Secure Your Data
CWSI is your trusted data security partner, providing value-driven solutions for clients across multiple industries to enhance their data protection and resilience. We support you in navigating the complex regulatory landscape to ensure that your organisation remains both compliant and secure. Explore our core practice area, ‘Governance, Risk, Compliance, and Advisory Services,’ to discover our comprehensive data security solutions. Reach out to us using the form below to speak with our experts and find out how we can help you tackle your data security challenges.
References:
Microsoft Purview—Data Protection Solutions | Microsoft Security
Learn about Microsoft Purview | Microsoft Learn
Unified Data Governance with Microsoft Purview | Microsoft Azure
Azure Storage in-place data sharing with Microsoft Purview (preview) | Microsoft Learn
