In today’s increasingly digital workplace, where employees are scattered across devices, locations, and collaboration platforms, ensuring the security and governance of your organisation’s data has never been more critical. As the modern workplace evolves, organisations are facing new challenges in managing sensitive information, meeting compliance requirements, and mitigating the risks associated with data fragmentation and sprawl.
Enter Microsoft Purview – a comprehensive set of solutions designed to help you govern, protect, and manage your entire data estate, regardless of where it resides. In this in-depth article, we’ll explore how Microsoft Purview can empower your organisation to take control of its Microsoft 365 environment, with a focus on data retention, governance, and lifecycle management.
Microsoft 365 Environment
The shift to a hybrid work model has driven a significant increase in the use of cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools, such as Microsoft 365. While these tools have enabled greater flexibility and connectivity, they have also introduced new complexities in managing and securing the vast amounts of data being generated and shared across the organisation.
Microsoft Purview
Microsoft Purview is a comprehensive solution that brings together data governance, compliance, and risk management capabilities to help organisations gain visibility, control, and protection over their data. At the heart of Microsoft Purview are three key components that are crucial for securing your Microsoft 365 environment: Data Retention, Governance, and Lifecycle Management.
Data Retention
Effective data retention is essential for meeting legal, regulatory, and organisational requirements, as well as minimising risk and liability. Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management (formerly known as Microsoft Information Governance) provides a range of tools and capabilities to help you retain the content you need and delete the content you don’t.
Using retention policies, retention labels, and retention label policies, you can enforce retention and deletion settings across your Microsoft 365 environment, including Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint sites, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. This ensures that your organisation is retaining the necessary information to meet compliance obligations, while also proactively disposing of data that no longer has business value.
One key feature of Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management is its ability to leverage adaptive policy scopes. This allows you to dynamically target retention policies to specific users, groups, or content types, ensuring that the right policies are applied to the right data, without the need for complex manual configuration.
For example, you can set up a retention policy that automatically applies to all Microsoft Copilot interactions, preserving the exact version of a document shared in a Copilot session, even as it evolves over time. This helps you maintain a comprehensive audit trail and meet regulatory requirements around the handling of sensitive information.
Governance
Effective data governance is crucial for maintaining control over your organisation’s information assets, mitigating risks, and demonstrating compliance. Microsoft Purview provides a range of governance capabilities to help you achieve these objectives.
One key aspect of Microsoft Purview’s governance capabilities is the ability to classify and label data based on its sensitivity, content, and other metadata. This includes the use of sensitivity labels, which allow you to apply protection and access controls to sensitive information, as well as automated classification using machine learning-powered data classifiers.
By understanding the nature and location of your data, you can then apply appropriate retention, protection, and access policies to ensure that sensitive information is handled appropriately, while also enabling secure collaboration and sharing.
Microsoft Purview also integrates with Microsoft Entra (formerly Azure Active Directory) to provide advanced identity and access management capabilities, such as just-in-time privileged access, conditional access, and entitlement management. This helps you maintain a secure and compliant environment by ensuring that users have the appropriate level of access to data and resources.
Lifecycle Management
Effectively managing the lifecycle of your organisation’s data is critical for minimising risk, reducing storage costs, and ensuring compliance. Microsoft Purview’s Data Lifecycle Management and Records Management capabilities provide the tools and functionality to automate and streamline these processes.
Using retention policies, labels, and label policies, you can establish clear rules for retaining, reviewing, and disposing of content across your Microsoft 365 environment. This includes the ability to set retention periods, enable disposition reviews, and maintain comprehensive audit trails to demonstrate compliance.
One particularly useful feature is the ability to leverage machine learning-powered classifiers to automatically apply retention labels to content, based on its content and context. This helps ensure that your data is consistently and accurately classified, without the need for manual intervention.
Additionally, Microsoft Purview offers the ability to import and manage PST files, enabling you to bring legacy email data into your Microsoft 365 environment and apply the same retention and governance policies to it. This helps you maintain a comprehensive view of your organisation’s data, regardless of its original source or location.
Data Security
Alongside the data governance capabilities of Microsoft Purview, the solution also offers a robust set of data security features to help protect your Microsoft 365 environment.
Data Protection
Microsoft Purview’s data protection capabilities include Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. This allows you to identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive information across emails and files, including those stored in Microsoft Teams file repositories.
By configuring DLP policies, you can scan content for the presence of sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, or intellectual property, and take appropriate actions to prevent data leaks or unauthorised access.
Additionally, Microsoft Purview offers advanced data protection features, such as Customer Key and Double Key Encryption, which enable you to maintain control over the encryption of your data, even in scenarios where Microsoft has access to your content.
Compliance
Ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements is a critical concern for organisations of all sizes. Microsoft Purview provides a range of compliance-focused solutions to help you meet your legal, industry, and organisational obligations.
One key component is the Microsoft Purview Compliance Portal, which offers a centralised hub for managing compliance activities, such as risk assessments, policy creation, and regulatory monitoring. This helps you gain visibility into your compliance posture and take proactive steps to address any gaps or issues.
The Compliance Portal also integrates with other Microsoft Purview solutions, such as Information Protection and Insider Risk Management, to provide a comprehensive view of your organisation’s compliance and risk landscape.
Risk Management
Effectively managing risk is essential in today’s complex and ever-evolving threat landscape. Microsoft Purview offers a range of risk management capabilities to help you identify, mitigate, and respond to potential threats and vulnerabilities.
This includes features like Insider Risk Management, which helps you detect, investigate, and take action on potentially harmful user activities, such as data leaks, policy violations, or other malicious behaviours. By leveraging machine learning and advanced analytics, Insider Risk Management can provide early warning signals and recommended actions to help you stay ahead of potential risks.
Microsoft Purview also integrates with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, a cloud access security broker (CASB) solution that provides visibility and control over your organisation’s cloud app usage. This helps you identify and manage the risks associated with shadow IT and unauthorised cloud app usage, ensuring that your data and resources are being accessed and used in a secure and compliant manner.
IT Infrastructure
To effectively secure and govern your Microsoft 365 environment, it’s crucial to have a robust IT infrastructure that can support the various components of Microsoft Purview.
Cloud Services
As a cloud-based solution, Microsoft Purview relies on the scalability and reliability of Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, including Azure and Microsoft 365. By leveraging these cloud services, organisations can benefit from built-in security features, automatic updates, and the ability to scale their data governance and compliance capabilities as their needs evolve.
Additionally, Microsoft Purview integrates with a wide range of other cloud-based services and platforms, allowing you to extend your data governance and compliance capabilities beyond your Microsoft 365 environment. This includes support for non-Microsoft data sources, such as Amazon S3, Google Drive, and Dropbox, through the use of Microsoft Purview Data Connectors.
Identity and Access Management
Effective identity and access management is crucial for securing your Microsoft 365 environment and ensuring that users have the appropriate level of access to data and resources. Microsoft Purview integrates with Microsoft Entra (formerly Azure Active Directory) to provide advanced identity and access management capabilities, such as just-in-time privileged access, conditional access, and entitlement management.
By leveraging these features, you can ensure that users only have the necessary permissions to perform their tasks, while also mitigating the risks associated with over-privileged access and unauthorised access attempts.
Endpoint Security
As the modern workplace extends beyond the traditional office environment, it’s essential to have robust endpoint security measures in place to protect your organisation’s data. Microsoft Purview integrates with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, a comprehensive endpoint security solution that provides advanced threat protection, vulnerability management, and device control capabilities.
By combining the data governance and compliance features of Microsoft Purview with the endpoint security capabilities of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, you can establish a comprehensive security and governance framework that spans your entire Microsoft 365 environment, from the cloud to the edge.
Information Governance
Effective information governance is the foundation for securing your Microsoft 365 environment and ensuring compliance with relevant regulations and organisational policies. Microsoft Purview provides a range of tools and capabilities to help you establish and maintain a robust information governance strategy.
Policy Creation
Using Microsoft Purview, you can create and deploy a wide range of policies to govern the retention, protection, and access of your organisation’s data. This includes the ability to define retention policies, sensitivity labels, and access controls, ensuring that sensitive information is handled appropriately and in accordance with your organisation’s requirements.
One particularly useful feature is the ability to leverage adaptive policy scopes, which allow you to dynamically target your policies to specific users, groups, or content types. This helps you ensure that the right policies are applied to the right data, without the need for complex manual configuration.
Monitoring and Auditing
Effective monitoring and auditing are essential for maintaining compliance and detecting potential security breaches or policy violations. Microsoft Purview provides a range of tools and capabilities to help you monitor and audit the activity within your Microsoft 365 environment.
This includes features like the Microsoft Purview Audit service, which provides a comprehensive audit trail of user and administrative activities across your Microsoft 365 services. Additionally, the Microsoft Purview Compliance Portal offers dashboards and reporting capabilities to help you gain visibility into your organisation’s compliance posture and identify any areas of concern.
Data Preservation
In addition to managing the retention and deletion of data, Microsoft Purview also offers capabilities to help you preserve critical information for legal, regulatory, or investigative purposes. This includes features like eDiscovery, which allows you to perform targeted searches and collections of relevant data, as well as advanced preservation and export capabilities.
By leveraging these data preservation features, you can ensure that your organisation is prepared to respond to legal or regulatory requests, while also maintaining a comprehensive audit trail of your data management activities.
Conclusion
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, securing and governing your Microsoft 365 environment has never been more critical. With Microsoft Purview, organisations can gain comprehensive control over their data, ensuring that it is retained, protected, and managed in accordance with relevant regulations, industry standards, and organisational policies.
By leveraging the data retention, governance, and lifecycle management capabilities of Microsoft Purview, IT professionals and compliance teams can establish a robust and streamlined approach to data management, while also benefiting from the solution’s advanced data security and risk management features.
As your organisation continues to navigate the complexities of the modern workplace, Microsoft Purview stands as a powerful ally, empowering you to take control of your data, mitigate risks, and demonstrate compliance – all while driving greater efficiency and productivity across your Microsoft 365 environment.
To learn more about how Microsoft Purview can help secure your organisation’s data, visit the IT Fix website and explore our range of IT solutions and services. Our team of experts is here to help you unlock the full potential of Microsoft Purview and transform your data management strategies.
