Microsoft 365 Information Governance Evolves with Unified Compliance and Data Governance Solution

This April, “to meet the challenges of today’s decentralized, data-rich workplace” Microsoft brought its existing collection of Microsoft 365 information governance and compliance solutions together under a new umbrella. The new Microsoft Purview brand combines the capabilities of the Microsoft 365 Compliance portfolio and the former Azure Purview.

Purview delivers a comprehensive set of solutions that help organizations govern, protect, and manage all their data wherever it resides. It’s a great step forward for Microsoft in providing a unified data governance and risk management solution for Microsoft 365.

The new Microsoft Purview:

• Provides visibility into data assets across locations, devices, and apps
• Enables easy access to all Microsoft data, security, and risk solutions
• Helps safeguard and manage sensitive data across clouds, apps, and endpoints
• Manages end-to-end data risks and regulatory compliance
• Empowers organizations to govern and protect data in new, comprehensive ways

Microsoft Purview also brings together data governance from Microsoft Data and AI, along with compliance and risk management from Microsoft Security.

Impressively, Purview includes identity and access management, threat protection, cloud security, and endpoint management. With additional privacy management capabilities, Purview delivers a comprehensive Microsoft 365 information governance solution.

Microsoft Purview Risk and Compliance Solutions

Microsoft Purview includes risk and compliance solutions that support services included in Microsoft 365. Think Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, and others. These compliance and risk solutions help organizations to:

• Protect sensitive data across clouds, apps, and devices
• Identify data risks and manage regulatory compliance requirements
• Get started with regulatory compliance

Protect Sensitive Data Across Clouds, Apps, and Devices

Every organization must protect some or all its data. Use the capabilities from Microsoft Purview Information Protection (formerly Microsoft Information Protection) to help discover, classify, protect, and govern sensitive information wherever it lives or travels.

Know Your Microsoft 365 Data

Modern businesses have information residing across all the Microsoft 365 services and on-premises. Identifying which items are sensitive and gaining visibility into how they’re being used is central to information protection practice. Microsoft Purview includes:

• Sensitive Information Types to identify sensitive items
• Trainable Classifiers that use examples of the data you’re interested in
• Data Classification, a graphical representation of items that have a sensitivity or retention label or have been classified by user actions

Protect Your Data

Sensitivity Labels provide the foundational capability for protecting data and interacting with other Purview solutions and tools. The labels provide users and admins with visibility into the sensitivity of the data that they’re using. And the labels themselves apply protection actions that include encryption, access restrictions, and visual markings.

Prevent Data Loss

Unintentional sharing of sensitive items poses a financial risk that may also result in legal and regulatory violations. Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention helps to protect against unintentional sensitive information sharing both inside and outside the organization.

Data Lifecycle Management

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management (formerly Microsoft Information Governance) provides the tools and capabilities to retain and delete content across Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft 365 Groups, Teams, and Yammer.

Encryption and Key Management

An important part of information protection strategy, the encryption process encodes data into ciphertext. Decryption requires an encryption key that only authorized users have.

With Microsoft Purview Double Key Encryption and Microsoft Purview Customer Key, admins explicitly authorize Microsoft 365 services to use encryption keys. This enables value added cloud services, such as eDiscovery, anti-malware, anti-spam, search indexing, and so on.

Insider Data Risks and Compliance Management

Insider risks include vulnerabilities that create major problems for the organization. These range from the loss of intellectual property to workplace harassment. Microsoft Purview offers the following compliance solutions to help the organization manage data risk and compliance requirements:

• Insider Risk Management to detect and act on risk activities
• Communication Compliance to detect and act on inappropriate and sensitive messages
• Information Barriers to restrict communication and collaboration between users
• Records Management to manage business, legal, or regulatory record-keeping requirements
• Audit (Premium) or Audit (Standard) to log and search for audited activities in SharePoint and OneDrive
• eDiscovery (Premium) or eDiscovery (Standard) to identify and manage data for legal cases

Get Started with Microsoft 365 Information Governance

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager, a feature in the Microsoft Purview Compliance Portal, and the above collection of compliance offerings help the organization manage the evolving landscape of regulatory requirements with greater ease and convenience.

Compliance Manager helps throughout the compliance journey, from taking inventory of data protection risks to reporting to auditors. It’s a great place to get started on Microsoft 365 Information Governance.

Microsoft Purview Unified Data Governance Solutions

Microsoft Purview also includes unified data governance solutions that help manage on-premises, multi-cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) data services. Think Azure storage services, Power BI, file services like Amazon S3, databases like SQL or Hive, and others.

Microsoft Purview Governance Portal is the new name for the Microsoft Compliance Administration portal, https://compliance.microsoft.com.  Users access these governance solutions through the portal, which enables organizations to:

• Create an up-to-date map of their entire data estate
• Identify where sensitive data is stored
• Create a secure environment for data consumers to find valuable data
• Generate insights about how data is stored and used

Microsoft 365 Information Governance Experts

The Microsoft 365 Information Governance experts at Messaging Architects guide business leaders in determining the right solutions for their business. They also configure Microsoft 365 to maximize productivity and security. This includes finding the optimal balance between accessibility and protection.

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