Microsoft 365 Environment
As digital transformation accelerates, organisations are increasingly relying on Microsoft 365 to power their day-to-day operations. This cloud-based suite of productivity and collaboration tools offers unparalleled convenience and efficiency. However, with the growing volume of sensitive data stored and shared across these platforms, securing your Microsoft 365 environment has become a critical priority.
Microsoft Purview Compliance Policies
Data Governance: Microsoft Purview provides a centralised control plane to help you understand, secure, and manage your entire data estate. Its data governance capabilities empower you to discover, classify, and protect sensitive information across Microsoft 365, Azure, and even third-party cloud services like Amazon S3.
Information Protection: Purview’s Information Protection features allow you to apply sensitivity labels to documents and emails, ensuring that only authorised users can access and share confidential data. These labels follow the content, providing persistent protection even when it’s shared externally.
Retention Management: Purview’s Retention policies enable you to manage the lifecycle of your data, ensuring compliance with industry regulations and internal policies. You can set retention and deletion rules based on content type, sensitivity, or user activity, helping you maintain control over your information.
Microsoft 365 Security Controls
Privileged Access Management: Leverage Azure Active Directory Privileged Identity Management to tightly control and monitor access to your organisation’s most sensitive resources. Implement just-in-time and just-enough access to minimise the risk of data breaches.
Identity and Access Management: Integrate Microsoft Entra (formerly Azure AD) to enforce strong authentication, conditional access, and risk-based policies, ensuring only legitimate users can access your critical data and applications.
Threat Protection: Leverage the power of Microsoft Defender to detect and respond to advanced cyber threats, from phishing attempts to malware infections. Defender’s unified threat detection and remediation capabilities help you stay one step ahead of potential attackers.
Regulatory Adherence
Compliance Frameworks: Align your Microsoft 365 environment with industry-standard security frameworks, such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks. Purview’s built-in assessments and improvement actions can help you achieve and maintain compliance with these widely recognised guidelines.
Industry-Specific Regulations: Depending on your sector, you may need to comply with regulations like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or GDPR. Purview offers pre-built assessment templates to help you address the specific requirements of these mandates, ensuring your data protection practices are up to par.
Data Privacy Laws: As data privacy regulations evolve, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the upcoming EU AI Act, Purview can assist you in identifying and mitigating risks, enabling you to stay ahead of the compliance curve.
Comprehensive Risk Management Framework
Risk Identification: Purview’s Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) capabilities help you gain visibility into your entire data estate, identifying sensitive information, oversharing risks, and potential vulnerabilities across cloud services and AI applications.
Risk Assessment: Leverage Purview’s Compliance Manager to assess your organisation’s compliance posture, measure progress, and gain a clear understanding of your risk exposure. The solution’s risk-based scoring system empowers you to prioritise improvement actions effectively.
Risk Mitigation Strategies: Implement robust data protection controls, such as sensitivity labelling, data loss prevention (DLP) policies, and insider risk management, to mitigate the risks of data breaches, leaks, and misuse. Purview’s integrated approach ensures these controls work seamlessly across your Microsoft 365 environment.
Microsoft Purview Compliance Center
Compliance Manager
Assessments: Purview Compliance Manager provides pre-built assessment templates for common industry standards and regulations, as well as the flexibility to create custom assessments tailored to your organisation’s unique compliance needs.
Improvement Actions: The solution offers step-by-step guidance on recommended actions to help you address compliance gaps and strengthen your security posture. For Microsoft-managed controls, Compliance Manager even provides implementation details and audit results.
Insider Risk Management
User and Entity Behavior Analytics: Purview’s Insider Risk Management capabilities leverage advanced analytics to detect anomalous user activities, such as excessive access to sensitive data or unusual login patterns, that could indicate potential insider threats.
Data Leaks Prevention: Integrate Purview’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies to monitor and protect against the unauthorised sharing or exfiltration of sensitive information, whether it’s happening through email, cloud storage, or collaboration platforms.
Information Barriers
Conflict of Interest Scenarios: Establish information barriers to prevent the inadvertent or malicious sharing of sensitive data between users or groups with conflicting interests, ensuring compliance with ethical walls and Chinese wall policies.
Communication Restrictions: Leverage Purview’s Communication Compliance features to detect and flag inappropriate or risky communications, helping you maintain a professional and compliant workplace environment across Microsoft 365 applications.
Data Protection in Microsoft 365
Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Sensitive Data Identification: Purview’s DLP capabilities can identify and classify a wide range of sensitive information types, from financial data and personally identifiable information (PII) to intellectual property and trade secrets.
Policy-Based Protection: Once sensitive data is detected, you can enforce DLP policies to prevent accidental or unauthorised sharing, transmission, or storage of this information across your Microsoft 365 environment.
Sensitivity Labels
Content Classification: Purview’s Information Protection allows you to create and apply sensitivity labels to documents, emails, and other content, based on the level of confidentiality or business criticality.
Access Controls: These sensitivity labels follow the content, ensuring that only authorised users can access and interact with sensitive information, even when it’s shared externally.
Retention Policies
Data Lifecycle Management: Purview’s Retention policies enable you to manage the entire lifecycle of your data, from creation and storage to eventual deletion or archival, in alignment with your organisation’s data governance and compliance requirements.
Litigation Hold: Implement legal holds on relevant data to preserve it for potential eDiscovery or litigation purposes, without disrupting your regular data management workflows.
Securing Microsoft 365 Applications
Microsoft Teams
Guest Access: Carefully control and monitor the access of external guests to your Teams channels and shared resources, ensuring that sensitive information doesn’t leak outside your organisation.
eDiscovery and Retention: Leverage Purview’s eDiscovery and Retention capabilities to maintain a comprehensive audit trail of your Teams communications and collaborate effectively during legal proceedings or regulatory investigations.
Microsoft Exchange
Mailbox Permissions: Implement granular mailbox permissions to restrict access to sensitive email communications, preventing unauthorised individuals from reading or forwarding confidential messages.
Anti-Malware and Anti-Spam: Integrate Microsoft Defender for Office 365 to safeguard your Exchange environment against malware, phishing attempts, and unwanted spam, protecting your users and data from cyberthreats.
Microsoft SharePoint
External Sharing: Carefully manage and monitor the sharing of SharePoint content with external parties, ensuring that sensitive information is only accessible to authorised individuals.
Information Rights Management: Apply persistent protection to SharePoint documents using Purview’s Information Protection features, ensuring that even if shared externally, the content remains secured and can only be accessed by those with the appropriate permissions.
By leveraging the comprehensive security and compliance capabilities of Microsoft Purview, you can create a robust, compliant, and resilient Microsoft 365 environment that safeguards your organisation’s sensitive data and supports your digital transformation journey. Whether you’re based in Manchester or any other part of the world, Purview can help you navigate the complexities of data security and regulatory adherence, empowering you to focus on driving innovation and growth.
