Securing Your Microsoft 365 Environment with Microsoft Purview Data Governance

Understanding the Evolving Data Landscape and Compliance Challenges

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations are facing an unprecedented challenge in securing and governing their data. The worldwide shift to a hybrid workplace has pushed us all to embrace ubiquitous connectivity, leading to a massive increase in the digital footprint and data fragmentation across a multitude of applications, devices, and locations. This explosion of data has created new vulnerabilities and compliance risks that organizations must address.

The Great Reshuffle has left blind spots within ever-enlarging data estates, and the virtual office has opened doors to new collaboration mediums that bring the risk of harassment, sensitive data leaks, and other workplace policy infractions. Even as organizations strive to harness the power of their data, they must navigate a complex web of regulations and compliance requirements to protect sensitive information and avoid costly penalties.

Traditionally, organizations have relied on a patchwork of security, data governance, compliance, and legal solutions, which has proven to be an ineffective and resource-straining approach. Security outcomes have worsened, audits have been failed, and brand reputations have been damaged. It’s clear that a more comprehensive and unified approach is needed to address these challenges.

Introducing Microsoft Purview: Empowering Data Governance and Compliance

Microsoft Purview is a comprehensive set of solutions that can help your organization govern, protect, and manage data, wherever it lives. By combining the capabilities of the former Azure Purview and the Microsoft 365 Compliance portfolio, Microsoft Purview provides a unified platform to address the fragmentation of data across organizations, the lack of visibility that hampers data protection and governance, and the blurring of traditional IT management roles.

Microsoft Purview empowers organizations to:

1. Discover and Protect Sensitive Data: Microsoft Purview provides a robust and coordinated set of data security solutions to help you discover and protect sensitive information across your entire data estate, including Azure storage services, Power BI, databases, and more.

2. Govern Data Across the Enterprise: Microsoft Purview includes unified data governance solutions that help you manage data services across your on-premises, multicloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments, enabling you to gain visibility and control over your data.

3. Minimize Compliance Risks: Microsoft Purview includes risk and compliance solutions to help your organization minimize compliance risks and meet regulatory requirements, including support for forensic investigations, sensitive content detection, and customized retention policies.

4. Protect Privacy and Manage Risks: Microsoft Priva, a separately available privacy management solution, proactively identifies and helps protect against privacy risks, providing visibility into your organization’s privacy posture and automating risk-remediation actions.

By unifying Microsoft’s data governance and compliance capabilities under the Microsoft Purview brand, Microsoft is providing a simpler and more comprehensive approach to data management, helping organizations get the most out of their data while simultaneously managing risk and compliance.

Securing Your Microsoft 365 Environment with Microsoft Purview

As organizations embrace the benefits of Microsoft 365, it’s crucial to ensure that the data within this environment is properly secured and governed. Microsoft Purview offers a range of features and best practices to help you achieve this goal.

Network Security and Connectivity

Microsoft Purview provides several network security capabilities to protect your data and ensure secure connectivity to the platform:

1. Private Endpoints: Use Azure Private Link Service to connect to the Microsoft Purview governance portal, access Microsoft Purview endpoints, and scan data sources, ensuring that only client calls originating from your private network can access the Microsoft Purview account.

2. Ingestion Private Endpoints: Leverage private endpoints to scan data sources in Azure or on-premises environments, keeping your data within its original location.

3. Firewalls and Network Security Groups: Utilize Azure Network Security Groups to filter network traffic to and from Azure resources, applying specific rules for Microsoft Purview private endpoints, self-hosted integration runtime VMs, and data sources.

Identity and Access Management

Microsoft Purview’s identity and access management features are crucial for securing your data and resources:

1. Role-based Access Control: Assign control plane and data plane roles to users, security groups, and service principals from your Microsoft Entra tenant, following the principle of least privilege.

2. Multi-factor Authentication: Enforce conditional access policies to require Microsoft Entra multi-factor authentication for all users with modify access to your Microsoft Purview instance.

3. Azure Resource Locks: Enable Azure resource locks to prevent accidental deletion or modification of critical Microsoft Purview resources, such as your Microsoft Purview account.

Data Protection and Encryption

Microsoft Purview takes a multi-layered approach to data protection, ensuring that your sensitive information is secure both in transit and at rest:

1. Encryption in Transit: Microsoft Purview secures customer data by encrypting data in motion with Transport Layer Security (TLS) v1.2 or greater, protecting it against “out of band” attacks.

2. Encryption at Rest: Microsoft Purview encrypts data at rest using Microsoft-managed keys, providing an additional layer of security beyond access controls.

3. Managed Event Hubs: Carefully manage any configured Event Hubs namespaces, as they can be used as an information distribution point, and consider disabling them if not in use.

Secure Data Ingestion and Scanning

To extract metadata from data source systems into the Microsoft Purview Data Map, it’s essential to follow secure practices for data ingestion and scanning:

1. Credential Management: Use managed identities or Azure Key Vault-stored credentials with read-only access to the data source systems, ensuring that sensitive credentials are properly protected.

2. Self-Hosted Integration Runtime: If using a self-hosted integration runtime to scan on-premises or VM-based data sources, secure the deployment and management of the self-hosted integration runtime VMs in your Azure or on-premises environment.

3. Data Residency: Leverage the Azure integration runtime or self-hosted integration runtime to extract metadata from data sources, ensuring that the actual data never leaves the boundary of your network when dealing with sensitive information.

By implementing these security best practices for your Microsoft 365 environment, you can leverage the power of Microsoft Purview to govern, protect, and manage your data, while mitigating compliance risks and safeguarding your organization’s sensitive information.

Integrating Microsoft Purview with Azure Security Products

To further enhance the security of your Microsoft 365 environment, Microsoft Purview can be seamlessly integrated with other Azure security products, such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud. This integration provides a comprehensive approach to identifying, prioritizing, and securing your most valuable data assets.

Sensitivity Labels and Asset Prioritization

If you’ve extended your Microsoft 365 sensitivity labels to assets and database columns in Microsoft Purview, you can leverage this information within Microsoft Defender for Cloud. This integration allows you to keep track of your highly valuable assets, using sensitivity labels to prioritize security recommendations and alerts.

Securing Sensitive Data Assets

Microsoft Defender for Cloud includes a secure score value for each security control, helping you prioritize your security efforts based on the importance of each recommendation. Additionally, alerts in Microsoft Defender for Cloud are assigned severity labels to assist you in addressing the most critical issues first.

By combining the insights from Microsoft Purview’s data governance capabilities with the security features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud, you can gain a holistic view of your data landscape and effectively protect your organization’s most sensitive information.

Conclusion: Embracing a Unified Approach to Data Governance and Compliance

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations face unprecedented challenges in securing and governing their data. The shift to a hybrid workplace has led to a proliferation of data across applications, devices, and locations, creating new vulnerabilities and compliance risks.

Microsoft Purview offers a comprehensive solution to these challenges, unifying data governance, compliance, and security capabilities into a single platform. By leveraging Microsoft Purview’s features and best practices, you can discover and protect sensitive data, govern your data across the enterprise, minimize compliance risks, and safeguard your organization’s privacy.

Furthermore, the integration of Microsoft Purview with other Azure security products, such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud, provides a holistic approach to securing your most valuable data assets. By embracing this unified approach to data governance and compliance, you can empower your organization to thrive in the digital age while mitigating the risks and challenges that come with it.

To get started with Microsoft Purview and secure your Microsoft 365 environment, visit the IT Fix website to explore our comprehensive resources and expert guidance.