Download the Data Governance Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: March 2023
Microsoft Compliance Manager is a feature in the Microsoft 365 compliance center that helps you manage your organization’s compliance requirements with greater ease and convenience. Compliance Manager can help you throughout your compliance journey, from taking inventory of your data protection risks to managing the complexities of implementing controls, staying current with regulations and certifications, and reporting to auditors.
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Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager was previously known as Microsoft Compliance Manager.
"The pricing and licensing are moderate because we have other licenses for Microsoft services. The pricing is in line with that."
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.
It helps you configure the system and even offers ideas on how to resolve important security concerns in an organization. It lists out all the issues that happen when we move data from the cloud to on-premises. It gives you a detailed view of the known issues and helps with industry standards so that the cloud features completely align with on-premises. We can see whether our data security is matching the industry standards.
It even offers prompts and ideas on items that you may not even have been aware of. It provides us with ideas on how to improve our proficiency in handling data in the cloud. And you can add notes for others in the reporting feature, so if there are any issues, others can refer to them.
The fact that Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments is also important to us. We have most of our data on Microsoft but part of our data, our university websites, for example, is on Amazon AWS. We move data between clouds and also from on-premises to the cloud. There is no other mechanism to check if this data is moving according to industry standards for such things as
We would not be able to see these metrics without Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager. It gives you a dashboard on how to improve your setup on the Microsoft cloud or even AWS. And it gives us the same information if we push data from on-premises to cloud.
Also, our users have a mix of operating systems. Most use Windows but there are also people who use macOS and Linux. With Purview, we can easily find the issues in Linux or more complex operating systems like macOS. We are notified of all issues with the help of Purview Compliance Manager.
I have been using Microsoft Services for about five years and most of these services are bundled.
It is a completely stable product.
It is also completely scalable. It is absolutely useful for smaller and bigger environments.
We are using the solution university-wide, including our branch offices. We don't have plans to increase our usage of it at the moment. Once we deploy more VMs or more Microsoft services, we will.
One area for improvement is the technical support for Purview. With all the other solutions from Microsoft we get really good technical support, but with Purview we had a compliance error and we couldn't find the solution. Purview would not point us to the correct solution, it just indicated the error. We had to troubleshoot it and find out what led to this error.
We contacted technical support but it took them one week to identify the root cause of the error.
Neutral
We didn't have another solution before this one.
The deployment is straightforward. We didn't need to do anything. It is an automatic solution because we had other solutions from Microsoft. It took us about one day to deploy, and we needed just one person involved.
If you are moving from another compliance manager to Purview, you will find it really easy. But if Purview is your first compliance manager, you will require some help from their support team to implement it.
Now that it is installed, it is being managed and used by five system administrators. They constantly monitor Compliance Manager and, when any issue comes up, they carry out whatever actions are necessary. They have to find out the root cause of this issue and act accordingly. That is their role.
We have definitely seen return on investment. The solution is budget-friendly. By going with Purview Compliance Manager, we don't need to go with specialized, online solutions. It saves us about 50 percent of our costs.
We also don't require specialized engineers or administrators, or other real-time monitoring solutions, to detect errors. That saves us time and money. These are the ways we get a return on our investment.
The pricing and licensing are moderate because we have other licenses for Microsoft services. The pricing is in line with that.
If you are moving from another compliance manager, then Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager is the perfect solution because you will have previous knowledge of compliance managers and be able to easily configure and use it. If it is a completely new installation and you haven't used a compliance manager before, I would suggest learning about this solution first to see if it will suit your environment. If you are new to Office 365 or the Microsoft environment, you will require some help. It will take more time.
