What is Microsoft Purview and how can it help you protect your data?

Microsoft Purview is a unified platform that allows you to identify, manage, govern and protect all your data wherever it lives. We’ll explain everything you need to know in our article. 

The importance of data governance and protection

It’s not an overstatement to suggest that your data is your business. It facilitates every task in every role, gets created, shared and stored across the entire organisation, reaches multiple external locations and even drives the decision-making processes of where your company wants to go next. 

Keeping a keen eye on what types of data you have, where that data goes and, crucially, who can access it is an increasingly complex undertaking for the modern workplace.  

It involves creating a comprehensive map of the locations across multiple clouds, services, platforms and on-premises locations that make up the whole infrastructure of your IT estate. 

However, managing this whole process with multiple toolsets becomes a huge drain on resources with the potential for massively increased security and operational vulnerabilities.  

Solid, dependable and proactive data governance and protection therefore must be high on the list of priorities for every organisation that needs their data to be working for them in the most valuable way. 

What is Microsoft Purview?

Discover. Understand. Protect

Microsoft Purview is a unified platform that allows you to identify, manage, govern and protect all your data wherever it lives. The solutions within Microsoft Purview provide essential help for addressing the common problem of data fragmentation across your organisation, giving clarity on the lack of visibility that can often be challenge for optimising data protection and governance. 

Data Discovery

It’s easy to reach a position where much of your data is hidden or obstructed from a centralised view. Without fully understanding and logging all that data, you are potentially vulnerable to operational and security challenges.  

Microsoft Purview automatically scans all the structured and unstructured data across every platform in your environment to properly classify it. The tools will trawl through everything in your data estate, across Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, non-Microsoft clouds, SaaS products and even on-premises locations.  

Working as a unified and single source solution, it makes cataloguing all your data possible. Importantly, you can then begin to understand how all that data is used in a more cohesive way, with enhanced searchability also available. 

Securing Sensitive Data in the age of AI

Microsoft Purview can be set to automatically, or manually, identify sensitive data that allows you to classify it and restrict use where appropriate. As well as the obvious benefits for data security and permissions, this has become an essential tool for modern organisations where proprietary data is used for Machine Learning or AI training. The robust protection of confidential information from misuse and sharing outside of your secure environment can only begin with this type of classification and tagging. 

 Book a Microsoft funded data discovery workshop

Comprehensive Compliance & Governance

The discovery and classification capability of Microsoft Purview is a great tool for compliance with regulatory frameworks such as GDPR where personal data is required for your workflow or HIPAA in the healthcare industries. Templates for these regulations are immediately available within Purview with associated guidance and compliance scores to continually support your adherence to them.  

It also provides the ability to centralise the management of your record and retention policies. Once these policies have been defined for how long certain data has to be kept before archiving or deletion, it can automatically be applied. It will even encrypt classified data when instructed so permissions can’t easily be evaded.  

Crucially, if your organisation does need to respond to any regulatory investigation, then Purview can easily find, preserve and export data in a much more streamlined way. 

Data Lineage – Making a Map

Microsoft Purview creates a detailed conceptual map of how and where data flows, transforms and is put to work across your whole organisation. This means you can instantly see the database or external source it originates from, how it transforms if it is converted from one structure to another, and ultimately where it ends up and is utilised in applications such as Microsoft Power BI, AI apps or reporting tools. 

The audit logs in Purview capture all the activity along this lifecycle to detail who accessed the data, when they did it, what changes they made, or attempted to make, and if any policy violations occurred. This represents a solid foundation for risk management and data security across every team member and hugely enhances the quality of understanding in exactly how you are using data. All of which can inform decisions on future improvements and efficiencies for better resource planning and outcomes. 

The Benefits of Microsoft Purview at a Glance

Simplification 

The consolidation of compliance, governance and security functionality into one unified view is transformative for any organisation. 

Productivity 

The time-heavy manual tasks of data scanning, monitoring and classification are preplaced with automation. 

Security & Trust 

The highest confidence amongst stakeholders, partners and customers comes from its assisted regulatory compliance and data leak prevention. 

Transparency and Data Mapping 

The advanced data lineage and cataloguing tools give an unrivalled visibility across your data storage and use, in one place. 

Integration & Scalability 

It is created to handle enterprise size organisations and seamlessly integrates with your all your existing Microsoft stack and external tools. 

Cost & Resource Assistance

Versions of the Microsoft Purview toolset may already be available to your organisation as part of your existing Microsoft 365 licensing. It is generally recommended that an E5 subscription is in place to get the most value from the benefits it brings. 

Once implemented, it can often remove the need for much of the time-consuming data monitoring tasks of team members in your organisation. This offers an opportunity to concentrate on more high value tasks or can even feed into a leaner resourcing strategy for the future. 

Contact us to see if Purview is included in your licence 

Why choose BCN?

BCN is proud to be one of a very small number of Microsoft partners holding accreditation in all six designations and Solutions Partner for Microsoft Cloud Status. 

Our position as one of the country’s leading technology partners places us in the perfect position to consult, create and develop the strategy and solutions for your organisation’s Microsoft Purview journey. The direct knowledge and associated experience that our people have will quickly become an asset for your continued success.