Purview Compliance Manager allows us to access our M365 setup and see how compliant and safe our data is. As it is a cloud environment, we don't have the control over the data or privileges like we would in the on-premises sector. We have to completely depend on the solution to secure this cloud and handle compliance actively. We also use the hints it gives us to resolve some issues.
Data loss protection is one of our most important priorities because, as a university, we have researchers and doctorate holders using the most complicated and confidential data. Purview Compliance Manager has a really good mechanism to prevent data loss. To date, we haven't found any incidents of loss. We move many gigabytes of data from on-premises to the cloud each day. Microsoft has a really good encryption mechanism to prevent any man-in-the-middle or other types of attacks. They would seem to be impossible because the solution definitely shows us if anything is happening or encryption mechanisms are missing from our side. It will correctly alert us and let us know what preventative measures to take.
We have bundled Microsoft products like Teams and OneDrive that store multiple types of data and different data formats. Every type of data is stored and any part of it can have malicious content. Our users will share OneDrive data with other Microsoft products. To verify whether things are properly aligned in our environment, we need a setup like Purview.
It also helps us to restrict access to China. Not everything can go to Chinese servers. With Purview, we can guarantee that it is not going to any malicious sites. It is well up to industry standards.
Also, Purview Compliance Manager decreases the number of solutions we need. It has access to all the solutions from Microsoft, so if you have a bundled solution, it can even control Outlook email and Azure—everything really. Data can be easily monitored with its dashboard, which is very helpful. It has reduced the complexity of data governance because we would require many other costly software solutions or special deployments in the cloud to visualize and govern all this data. With Microsoft Purview, we don't need to think of anything else because the system can easily view all the data. Even if the data is migrating, it is guarded by the guidelines. It provides multi-system administration.
Before Purview, we didn't know what our data was like in the cloud: how it was stored or how it was maintained. With this solution's large set of options, there is a data retention mechanism and a data auditing mechanism. It will audit data periodically and tell us if there are errors in the data or storage or encryption mechanisms. If the encryption is wrong or any hacking is tried, it will show the vulnerabilities.
It also enables us to show compliance in real time at any point in time and that is one of the highlights. It gives you clear visibility into your data. That is an important advantage of having Purview Compliance Manager in our environment. The solution keeps on updating as the standards update. For example, last year we didn't have encryption patterns that are as advanced as we have this year. So we don't need to think about these things. Microsoft will ensure that it meets industry standards.
With on-premises solutions, if we have any data loss issues we require multiple devices to detect them and the solution has to be done by another device. We need multiple devices, a large set of hardware, to handle all of this data and ensure data loss protection. But once data is in the cloud and our security services are also in the cloud, we are able to organize all this data and even accept transfers from less secure environments. That's because Purview Compliance Manager gives us correct and accurate solutions to issues, and it will also give us a fix. If we have an on-premises issue, it could take us one day to deal with it. With Purview, we can find the issue and a solution within one hour.
Another benefit is that with an on-premises solution we depend on a complete set of hardware to ensure data loss protection, but with data and this solution in the cloud, we just need one subscription, and it is a bundled subscription. Budget-wise, it is considerably less; less than half the cost.
