Without question, data has emerged as one of the business world’s most valuable assets, powering strategy and growth. However, managing and securing that data in a way that ensures the availability of quality data while supporting compliance and security goals can prove challenging. Microsoft tools for information governance offer solutions.
In 2022, Microsoft Purview emerged as the company’s flagship offering for information governance. With tools for both information governance and information protection, Purview provides solutions for organizing, securing, and monitoring data throughout its lifecycle.
Information Governance with Microsoft Purview
Microsoft Purview streamlines the process of managing data across the organization, no matter where it lives. It begins by scanning and cataloging data sources, enriching information with metadata such as data classifications, lineage, and owners. Powerful search options allow users to discover and access relevant data for specific business needs.
Purview also helps with regulatory compliance by enabling organizations to apply policies to information assets based on data classification. For instance, administrators can apply retention policies to entire workloads or retention labels to specific items. This applies to all types of data, from email to documents and chats.
In addition, Microsoft Purview includes three eDiscovery solutions to help organizations identify and deliver information for use in legal proceedings. Depending on the subscription purchased, organizations can search and export relevant data. They can also apply legal holds, preserve, collect, review, and analyze data.
Information Protection with Microsoft Purview
A key aspect of information governance involves protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access, deletion, or improper sharing. Purview leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically identify and label sensitive data across both on-premises and cloud environments.
For example, sensitivity labels can be applied automatically to data, such as financial data, that matches specific conditions. The organization can then apply protection actions to the label. This may include encrypting the data or restricting who can access it and what they can do with it. The label and its associated protections stay with the content wherever it travels.
The Microsoft Purview compliance portal provides a centralized dashboard to simplify information protection and regulatory compliance. Using the portal, data administrators can quickly evaluate data compliance and security company wide. They can also access and modify sensitive information types, set data loss prevention and retention policies and more.
Additional Microsoft Tools for Information Governance
Microsoft offers additional solutions to support information governance. For instance, the Microsoft 365 Security Center provides a centralized hub for managing the Microsoft Defender suite of security solutions. These solutions protect organizations from cyberthreats across their identities, email, data, endpoints, and cloud apps.
Using the Security Center, security personnel can monitor and respond to security incidents across the entire Microsoft 365 environment from a single dashboard. They can also leverage the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect and prioritize threats, automate investigations and responses, and provide actionable insights and recommendations.
Further, Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive support information governance by enabling organizations to collaborate, share and organize content securely and efficiently. For example, SharePoint and OneDrive offer advanced access policies that allow administrators to control who can access, share, and download content from their sites and files.
Microsoft 365 Information Governance Experts
Microsoft provides powerful tools for information governance. However, choosing the right solutions, determining the right licensing, and using the options to their full extent requires a significant learning curve.
The consultants at Messaging Architects bring deep expertise in both Microsoft 365 and information governance. They will assist your organization in unlocking the capabilities within Microsoft 365 and finding the sweet spot combining accessibility with data security.
Keep your data secure and compliant
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eGovernance is a Cloud based solution for preserving, discovering and accessing digital data within your email and document storage systems for compliance, audit, security, eDiscovery and warehousing of critical or older data.
