Launched in September 2021, Azure Purview (as it was then known) was designed to help users govern their information securely and ensure regulatory compliance across multiple data environments. This April saw the platform rebranded to “Microsoft Purview,” and accompanying enhancements resulted in a data governance tool that’s even more empowering than before.
Microsoft Purview – An Overview
To those unfamiliar with Purview it is essentially a family of tools centred around the concept of watertight data governance; tailored specifically for organisations with a heavy compliance burden.
Whatever your data security concerns may be, Purview has you covered.Are you concerned that insecure communication might result in sensitive information ending up somewhere it shouldn’t be? Microsoft Purview’s Communication Compliance tool can be used to flag-up the inappropriate sharing of sensitive information; allowing you to take action to avoid a data breach.
Does poor data management practice present a risk to you? Fear not, as the Microsoft Purview “insider risk management” tool will enable you to detect and act against any behaviour which risks the security of your organisation’s data. Microsoft Purview provides you with the flexibility to configure user-defined “insider risk policies” enabling you identify and manage security threats which are of particular concern to your business’s data assets.
Looking to escape the time burden of onerous compliance obligations? Compliance manager simplifies and streamlines the enforcement of compliance obligations. Microsoft Purview provides a suite of tools providing you with risk inventories, controls, the production of risk reports and much more. The Compliance Manager portal provides you with a dashboard, giving at-a-glance insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your compliance landscape, allowing your organisation to take urgent action where it is most needed.
Need to balance easy access to data with your organisation’s strict compliance obligations? Microsoft Purview Information protection lets you effortlessly assign sensitivity labels. These allow you to control and grant access to data when appropriate and shield more sensitive data against unwanted intrusion. Additional security measures such as encryption can be applied to confidential files, and the system can be implemented across your digital estate; from information stored in third party apps to every corner of Microsoft office, whether web-hosted or on-device.
Wait, there’s more…
While data governance is a key tenet of Microsoft Purview’s capabilities, the business benefits don’t stop there. One of the challenges many organisation have is that data stored in a myriad of locations – both on-site and in the cloud – sometimes even by shadow IT outside of organisation controls. Microsoft Purview takes the legwork out of managing multiple data stacks by automatically discovering and classifying data and allowing it to become text searchable. This brings an otherwise unwieldy mass of data to a single-source-of-truth, enabling your organisation to make more efficient use of the data it holds.
In addition to rationalising data from different locations to provide a unified view, Microsoft Purview goes one step further by monitoring the evolution of data across its lifecycle. Documenting the source and any subsequent changes made to an item allows users to decide how to use the data; an untrusted source for example may negatively affect the usability of information.
So in short, Microsoft Purview makes the discovery, traceability and searchability of data across multiple siloes effortless, by using the power of automation to organise and track data from its point of inception.
So how can Microsoft Purview benefit my organisation?
Microsoft Purview arrived at a time when the modern workplace was more data-intensive and fragmented than ever. The pandemic resulted in disparate workplaces, with remote workforces often required to draw upon data from sources far and wide. This placed an even greater burden on the C-suite personnel tasked with securing and managing organisational data under the omnipresent burden of compliance legislation such as GDPR. Additionally, the acceleration in the trend towards more flexible working practices stressed the importance of fast, easy data sharing and connectivity across all departments.
Microsoft Purview grasps the nettle of the modern world of work by combining the compliance tools needed by risk managers with cutting edge data discovery capabilities that are essential for extracting maximum value from organisational data.
Microsoft Purview’s Core Benefits:
- Comprehensive data governance. Bring together data from every corner of your organisation and apply controls, labels and permissions en-masse to ensure adherence to your compliance obligations. Use in-built services to stay on top of the most current compliance obligations to ensure that your business is ahead of the game.
- Enhanced Data visibility. Shed light on the furthest reaches of your data estate and extract value from dormant data. Assign access as appropriate, and give your staff unprecedented ability to search for and use data hidden in siloed locations that would otherwise be time-intensive to collate.
- Protect your bottom line as well as your data. AI and automation will allow your team to focus on the activities that generate revenue. Consign manual data discover to the past and free up your team for more fruitful, value-adding activities.
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