Microsoft Purview Data Governance Reviews

Our goal was to provide insights into the latest data entries, implement governance measures, identify and classify sensitive data, and address specific business use cases. The primary use cases revolved around establishing a comprehensive data lineage, accompanied by pertinent metadata. This was primarily aimed at providing a business-centric dashboard, enabling stakeholders to visualize how data moves from one point to another and ultimately reaches the target. 

In my experience, I've utilized it on Windows machines with Blackfish without encountering any issues.

The dashboard offers insights into the nature of the data, and the transformations occurring between different columns, and allows for traceability to identify any issues that may arise. These use cases have proven highly beneficial not only for business analysis but also for support activities. For instance, it aids support personnel in quickly identifying issues such as missing data or anomalies, streamlining the troubleshooting process for efficient problem resolution.

Purview facilitates data management across diverse cloud and platform environments, encompassing AWS and GCP. However, my experience has been exclusively with Azure. Given that my ecosystem operates within Azure, both the source and target activities are conducted seamlessly within the Azure framework. The integration is smooth since Microsoft Purview is inherently designed for Microsoft components, making it effortless to establish connections and retrieve the required data. I haven't employed it for other sources or alternative cloud systems.

The importance of Purview lies in its careful consideration of critical global regulations. As a data governance solution, it plays a crucial role in business development processes. Given the potentially sensitive nature of incoming data, proper classification is essential to ensure specialized treatment. This facilitates easy access for subsequent activities such as metadata modifications or updates, providing sufficient information for comprehension by business personnel. The tool proves beneficial for data quality officers, enabling them to monitor data and detect any discrepancies, empowering them to take necessary actions. In the realm of the cloud, Purview emerges as a highly valuable data governance solution.

The integration of Microsoft Purview has significantly reduced the need for multiple solutions to interact within our company. This reduction not only streamlines processes but also saves time. For example, when a problem arises, understanding, identifying, and resolving it becomes much easier compared to the traditional approach of tracing through multiple systems for the root cause. With Microsoft Purview, the identification process is simplified, leading to potential savings in support efforts. Business stakeholders also benefit by gaining more visibility into how data flows through the system and understanding the metadata information without relying heavily on support or technical personnel. This autonomy enhances their ability to assess and comprehend the situation independently.

I haven't implemented it to enhance response time for insider threats by applying security measures. However, the tool does provide visibility into the movement of data, allowing the data control officer to monitor and classify alarms promptly. In the event of an alert, appropriate actions can be taken accordingly.

Efforts have significantly diminished, and this reduction is directly proportional to cost savings. As a technical person involved in both solution development and support processes, I've observed a reduction of more than fifty percent. The turnaround time for issue resolution has notably decreased. Previously, it took others a considerable amount of time to identify the root cause, but with Microsoft Purview, pinpointing issues and finding solutions has become much more efficient.

It has had a significant impact on our capacity to maintain compliance. As a data governance solution, it offers features essential for ensuring that compliance requirements are thoroughly met, and data processing aligns with regulatory standards.

The user interface is highly intuitive and user-friendly.

I appreciate it because it provides a unified solution. Everything can be managed in one place, from scanning sources to making assets available. The access includes comprehensive metadata information, presented in a non-technical manner for easy comprehension of the asset's nature. The visualization it offers is quite clear. Additionally, it creates a lineage based on data processing, allowing for workflow authorization and control over metadata modifications or other activities. 

It caters to the entire micro-ecosystem, providing connectivity and seamless data flow. It allows for scanning, asset discovery, and data coverage. While there are some existing limitations, it's important to note that the tool is continuously evolving. I believe it holds great potential and will become an excellent resource for development in the future.

Purview's data connector platform is designed to facilitate ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources. I've personally applied this feature to one of our sources, an Oracle database. Specifically, we utilized ADA for data permissions and seamlessly integrated it with the Azure Data Factory pipeline. This automated the connection to Oracle, enabling the setup of data extraction and loading processes. Overall, it proved to be a valuable and effective feature.

Enhancing the tool's capability to connect to multiple sources would be valuable. Also, when data is transformed in other systems, the tool should capture the relevant metadata and generate lineage for those systems as well. Thirdly, addressing limitations, such as relying on Apache Atlas for mitigation, should be handled within the Microsoft tool itself rather than external dependencies like Apache Atlas.

I have been using it for approximately six months.

The stability is satisfactory, and I would give it a rating of eight out of ten.

I have utilized it in a cloud environment, and scalability is assured.

I am content with technical support, but for various inquiries, the responses often indicate that the feature is either not available or still in a previous state. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. Even individuals with less technical expertise can do it.

Deployment spanned a week and involved six different individuals.

Maintenance becomes necessary when leveraging external APIs and tools, especially concerning access management. However, once the initial setup using MS Purview is complete, ongoing maintenance is minimal. Automation takes over with continuous scanning, automatic data classification, and sensitivity labeling. Workflows can be established and utilized for an extended period, reducing the need for frequent maintenance.

I consider it cost-efficient because of the metrics it provides. With each scan being incremental, avoiding redundant scans of the same object, the tool offers a way to manage costs effectively.

We didn't extensively evaluate other options because Microsoft Purview successfully met the requirements for the specific tasks at hand. However, during implementation, I became aware of more mature tools available in the market that might offer greater capabilities. It seems that Microsoft Purview is still evolving compared to these more established alternatives.

In my scenario, I encountered difficulty connecting to a file system database, especially when it was located on a different server. Additionally, when working with an in-house solution like Azure Data Factory, while Microsoft Purview can successfully bring metrics to tables as assets, it faces limitations in identifying the leading use of those assets. For instance, a database solution handling ETL activities may not seamlessly provide insights into the transformations, sources, immediate obligations, and final targets associated with a specific asset, making it challenging to track its usage directly within Microsoft Purview.

I would strongly recommend Microsoft Purview when utilizing solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Data Factory, various applications, and databases.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten because several features are still in a preliminary state. Given that it is in preview, it may not be as stable or fully functional yet. Also, the absence of data quality and data profiling mechanisms contributes to this rating.

In both my previous and current organizations, I've worked with Microsoft Purview. While my previous company had a premium license for all services, my current one doesn't. At my previous company, I used Purview to design communication compliance policies, likely leveraging some pre-built policies from Microsoft security. Initially, we lacked a specific goal, but my exploration of the platform led me to pursue a cybersecurity certification to optimize its use. This helped me design DLP policies more effectively and implement signing for communication compliance policies. Recently, I discovered eDiscovery and its value for exporting large datasets for specific employees based on their protection level. Lastly, I found its activity tracking feature particularly useful for monitoring employee movements in our large, partially remote workforce of nearly 100 employees, with less than half in the main office. This tracking proved valuable for detecting potential data leaks during employee departures. I briefly explored Insight Risk Management during a one-month license trial.

Purview's multi-platform capabilities, supporting iOS, Mac, and Android, have been invaluable to me. As a beginner in device management software, the prospect of using another option with a large web portal felt daunting. Purview's ability to manage devices across different operating systems saved me significant time.

At my previous company, all internal data lived in Azure, but client data resided in Salesforce. This siloed structure made comprehensive data control impractical without a tool like Purview that seamlessly supports ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources.

Purview's natively integrated compliance across Azure Dynamics 365 and Office 365 is even stronger than its ability to integrate with third-party solutions.

It's crucial that Purview was built with critical regulations from around the world in mind, especially for those of us in the European Union where EU regulations apply. This is a key consideration for everyone involved in data governance. While some frameworks offer vast data capabilities, the sheer volume of work required for a medium-sized business to ensure compliance with regulations across all these frameworks would be insurmountable.

I initially found the DLP system overwhelming due to its capabilities exceeding the needs of our small organization, where I implemented simpler policies. However, it proved valuable for ensuring compliance with GDPR, and PCI DSS and provided visibility into sensitive data sharing.

Purview has saved our organization a huge amount of money and time.

Through Purview, we were able to streamline our technology stack by consolidating the number of solutions we relied on. This prompted us to re-evaluate our vendor landscape, ultimately leading us to migrate everything to Microsoft and leverage their comprehensive suite of tools. Surprisingly, most of the functionalities we previously paid for were already available within the Microsoft ecosystem. This simplified our IT infrastructure, transitioning us from a predominantly on-premises setup to a cloud-based one, with Microsoft solutions forming the core of our cloud environment.

Purview has improved my ability to stay on top of compliance.

The most valuable feature is the tracking activity and device onboarding.

I have some concerns about the separation of roles in Purview from the Microsoft tenant, as well as how they interact with the security portal and endpoint manager. Certain permission issues or protracted permission updates could arise due to suboptimal configuration, potentially extending the expected timeframe.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for two years.

Microsoft Purview is stable in protection but there are some bugs in the GUI.

Designed for enterprise-level organizations, Microsoft Purview scales effortlessly.

The initial deployment was straightforward. I was able to do the entire deployment with the help of one other person.

We used a Microsoft partner when we started working with the tenant before starting to use Purview.

While Purview's standard pricing might not be accessible to most small businesses, we were fortunate to benefit from the educational pricing which made it a financially viable option for our needs.

I would rate Microsoft Purview a nine out of ten.

Maintaining Purview is essential, as some internal problems, like endpoints disconnecting within the organization, can develop over time.

To fully leverage Microsoft Purview's capabilities, it is recommended that one first familiarize themselves with the organization's existing infrastructure.

I'm an IT consultant, and I have several clients ranging from small businesses and start-ups to large FTSE 100, multi-billion-pound companies. I've implemented Purview from a data security perspective, such as aggregating data using the DLP and AIP (Azure Information Protection). The point of Purview is to enable companies to have a grip on their data and create rules, policies, and visibility around that.

One of the biggest positives of Purview is the visibility you gain into your estate. Once you start labelling data, you can get reports and information about where your confidential and critical data are. It gives you far more visibility than you would have if you tried to do things manually.

While Purview doesn't reduce the number of systems you need, it covers the functionality of data security that, otherwise, would have to be done by a third-party product. And it probably would not only be one third-party solution. Only something like Varonis would be really comparable, in my experience.

By avoiding the need for a third-party product for data security, because it's a bolt-on with the 365 licenses—E3 or E5—it absolutely saves you money.

The labelling is the most valuable feature for the companies I'm installing it for. Some of them have several thousand staff, and their concerns are around confidential or private data being shared. The labels and the policies involved with them give them that initial visibility.

It's absolutely important that it covers multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, including AWS, GCP, et cetera. If you're going to have a DLP solution, it needs to cover as much as possible. A solution that doesn't integrate with other systems isn't going to work for most companies. That's one of the reasons I like Purview: you can plug in and use APIs to connect to other systems and scan other data.

As for connecting to iOS, Mac, and Android devices, the more the better in terms of what Purview can do from a connection aspect.

And Purview's natively integrated compliance across Azure Dynamics and Office 365 is absolutely essential. It's really good. A lot of my clients are Office 365 customers, and they hold a lot of their data in the 365 tenant. It makes Purview an obvious choice for customers with that environment and setup. Any company that uses Microsoft 365 should use Purview to some degree.

Another aspect that is very important is that the solution was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world. Some of my clients are huge financial organizations, and they need to implement things like ISO security, GDPR, and financial scanning on things like credit card numbers. It's really good.

I've also implemented the DLP policies, settings, scanning, et cetera, as well as rules around that. For example, when data is encrypted when it's sent or shared, there is no forwarding of emails.

There are negatives to the compliance aspect of Purview in that you get a lot of false positives with some of the native scanning and rules in the platform. A lot of them need tweaking to get a more realistic handle on what data there is.

Also, I wouldn't say that the remediation of policy violations is particularly great. It has improved, but it's not very easy to dig into things if there is a policy violation. A lot of them are false-positives.

It has helped reduce the time to action on insider threats, but there are quite a lot of false positives there as well. Overall, it's a work in progress for Microsoft.

I would also like to see pre-built reporting. The dashboard isn't really that intuitive. It would be good to have more intuitive dashboards that you can drill down into or even customizable dashboards.

I've been using Purview for about three years, almost since the functionality was available at the beginning.

The stability of Purview is almost faultless. It's a nine out of 10.

The scalability is very good—nine out of 10 again. Once all the data is in Purview, you don't need to worry about scalability. It would only apply when you need to bring in a new integration or application, and that is fairly easy to do.

The support is not particularly good. I've probably had some more advanced issues than the average person, due to having deployed it into a more mature config, and I found that on two or three occasions, when I had an issue or question around Purview, I really didn't have a good person at Microsoft talk to me about it. It needed to go through quite a lot of escalation to get to someone with advanced skill for it.

Neutral

I've installed it on-premises, hybrid, and in the cloud. It works best when it's all in the cloud. The initial deployment is really straightforward. It's one of the easiest products I've deployed from Microsoft.

There is maintenance involved; policies and alerts need to be reviewed. The whole data security aspect is an ongoing process.

I do it myself.

We have seen ROI because we're not having to pay for third-party scanning or security on our files.

In addition, while you can't measure it, we know our data is at less risk. We have a lot more confidence in that regard.

Also, potentially, you don't need as many security staff to monitor it, with the possibility of savings from that.

The pricing is reasonable because it's part of the 365 E3 or E5 license you buy.

What I would like to see is that Microsoft Priva, which is an add-on to Purview, be absorbed into the solution for a smaller sized consumer/company.

I have also used Varonis as an alternative. The biggest difference is that Varonis is a standalone product, whereas Purview is built into Office 365. That's the biggest positive for Purview, in comparison. That makes it easier, with Purview, to customize and switch on the scanning of data without having to go through rigorous processes to capture data, as is the case with Varonis.

Get someone who is experienced in deploying it.

Purview's data connector platform for ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources is improving fast. Originally, there wasn't as much there as I'd have hoped for, but the platform has been developed heavily in the last 18 months, and it's pretty good now. When you can see the apps from third parties in the GUI, it just makes it really easy to integrate them.

Purview doesn't really do that much to educate users on how to best handle sensitive data. That's more down to how the user is trained. It's only as good as how it is set up by the company. Like with all products, it is only as good as how well it is initialized, configured, and maintained.

When it comes to seeing compliance in real time, Purview does roughly give you that, but it's only as good as how it's configured. If it's not configured well to scan all of the data areas in your company, it won't do the job. To give you an example, someone could have Purview switched on but have a hybrid-cloud environment and not be scanning their on-premises file services. Purview can do that, but they might not have configured it to do so.

I would give Purview a solid eight out of 10. It has come a long way since I started using it. There is still work that needs to be done on it, but they've done a great job on it so far.

Data loss prevention is a significant use case for us. I'm not on the security team, so I don't know exactly what kicked it off, but I believe we wanted Purview for the DLP capabilities first, and that led to us taking advantage of the other aspects of the solution. We have Azure, Purview, Defender, and all of the other Microsoft products. We're trying to leverage and use all of them. 

We have Intune for deployments and things like that. We're rolling out the zero-trust model right now. We use Jamf to manage our Macs because I'm not knowledgeable enough to Intune correctly, and it doesn't have the functionality that Jamf does. We can move over to Intune or whatever. So I think they're definitely trying to push me that way.

I don't know if I've gotten much value out of Purview personally, but our security team loves it. Our biggest concern is leakage or theft of our data because we have a lot of PII and stuff that has not been released. We like the insights Purview provides and the way the solution can track and manage things. I'd say that was probably their favorite piece of it so far. From everything the security team has told me, the policy management and DLP features are working spectacularly.

We have had some issues automating our document management with Power Apps. I haven't been super-disappointed with anything except for Power Apps, which kinda drives me nuts. I think it's because I am a coder who can do things properly, and I keep trying to do things there, but it's not working out the way. The security team is pretty quick. I'm kind of a thorn in their side. I always try to get around stuff. They haven't come to me for anything saying, "Hey, I can't find this information." They're pretty good. Maybe, there's a lack of documentation, but that doesn't seem to be an issue for our team. 

Another thing involves SharePoint. We have everything in SharePoint up on the cloud, and we want to ensure it's secure, so we have blocked all external access. You need to have one of our devices and our codes. But the C suite wasn't pleased because it was accessible externally for a while. And we have a penetration company that does testing. They were able to harass one of our users enough that they finally clicked the button that says "Approve this Login," so it just takes one time. 

They find red flags everywhere in organizations. The gut reaction was to cut off external access for now and figure out what we can do down the road after that, but this is a stopgap measure. However, the C suite told us that it wasn't good enough, but there was no way somebody outside could access our systems. You need to be on a trusted IP or our VPN. We have conditional access configured.  

We hired an actual outside consultant company to come in And I've been working with them for close to a year now. We're trying to leverage Purview and Power Apps to automate our document management. We have a ticket open with Microsoft because that's one more thing we're struggling with. It's supposed to go through and look for any PII data, like Social Security numbers, etc. We also have really low retention policies. For example, our emails are retained for only six months maximum. Team conversations are saved for two days. They're they're brutal. Legal discovery can be expensive, so they want to make sure we don't have anything to discover. 

I'm wondering if Purview can do some of the things that we're struggling with, and we're tripping over ourselves because the other thing we did was configure it so you have to be in a special group to even access those files. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Purview Information Protection has a labeling component. Still, I don't know how much it organizes labeled documents, and I think it also includes labeling after detecting user behavior that the system tracks.  They talked about something similar in one of the keynotes I recently listened to. I'm like, "Why are we not doing that?"  I'm looking at how we're just beating our heads against the wall. Even if we get this in place, it would still be very challenging. 

We like this In terms of usability and security. It will be difficult for our teams to do their jobs with all this other garbage in place. At this point, we've got it almost always set up, but it isn't working the way we need it to on the Power Apps side of things. 

And we've got a ticket open with the Power Apps team to figure out why it isn't working because it's supposed to be on a scheduled thing, but we've let it sit for weeks at a time, and nothing ever happens. It doesn't run. And there's no way to monitor. We don't know if it's doing anything, or we can look at our files to make sure that could be improved. 

We started using Purview in the last six months.

We are a new company. We broke off from a much larger organization three years ago, but we had about 3,000 people in the last organization, and we're down to 300. Before Purview, I don't think we had anything for DLP because there was so much to do. It was all hands on deck for about a year and a half where we were just trying to get that stuff done.

We have dev and production environments in AWS, and we're using native AWS tools to monitor the applications over there. I don't know how effective they are compared to Purview. We outsourced all of that to another company. The guy who owns it used to work with us.

I am not involved in purchasing. My company is willing to throw as much money as needed to be as secure as possible. Security is our priority, so we'd probably pay for it even if it was pretty expensive.

I rate Microsoft Purview eight out of 10. 

We do a lot of projects for state governments in the US. One of the states had a vast amount of data, around 20 years worth, spread across various systems. We had non-relational databases, files, Snowflake, Oracle, Excel, and more. We aimed to turn this data into meaningful information, track its lineage, and identify problems. I did the proof of concept for this.

It is crucial to us that Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world. The tool considers compliances related to PHI, PII data, and Europe's GDPR. All these are taken into consideration while developing the tool. That's really good.

For data loss protection in Purview, we've explored how third-party access works, particularly concerning the exposure of sensitive data like PHI and PII. We looked into how this data can be masked or hidden. Currently, our team is developing further based on these explorations.

As one of the world's leading healthcare companies, we manage vast amounts of data, especially from state government projects. Healthcare data is very critical, and we can't expose any PII or PHI data due to compliance requirements. 

We audit every three to six months, and we need to justify why the PII or the PHI data has been accessed. From that point of view, this solution gives us very good leverage from the data governance perspective.

Purview has helped to reduce the number of solutions we need to interact with each other because this has a governance portal, analytics portal, data catalog, and data dictionaries. Everything can be done in one single tool.

The beauty of Microsoft tools is that they are valuable, and most of them are UI-driven. A couple of my team members who did not undergo any kind of training, were able to leverage the tool and explore it to the core. Whereas other tools that we use, for example, Erwin or any IBM tool, need a lot of training or a lot of self-running to start mastering the tool. 

At the same time, Microsoft is very easy. Using one single tool, we can accomplish everything. This has made a huge impact on the project timelines including the implementations of certain solutions, data governance portal, building a data governance portal, etcetera. This solution has reduced the number of solutions that affected the complexity of our data governance.

Purview tremendously has affected the visibility we have in our state. Because when we started in our company, nobody had explored using a data governance tool and Microsoft Purview. It was still coming out of its cocoon. We were working together with Microsoft on a lot of issues.

Purview enables us to show our compliance in real time. When I'm on a government project, and we discuss the data, often the management or leadership asks for a report. We simply log in to the tool and instantly create a report. In just a fraction of a second, we have all the information at our fingertips.

Purview has helped to reduce the time to action on insider threats by 30% to 40%. We can identify which fields expose our data or the columns that expose our PII PHI. We also know the data lineage and who has access to the data. 

In case of any compliance issue, it will pinpoint the particular individuals who have access to this data, and then we can ask for an explanation.

The use of Purview helped to save both time and money because we ended up using one tool for most of the data governance work. The project I worked on was around $600,000, and the POC was around $200,000. We probably saved around $400,000 annually.

Purview has affected our ability to stay on top of compliance and provides a report on who has access to the data. Whenever we have an audit, it helps to determine who accessed the data and their need for access. It has a significant impact.

The data lineage feature stands out. It tracks where the data comes from and any changes made. However, it's currently limited to Microsoft products. We can track lineage data with Azure Data Factory.

Another great feature is the ability to connect to any data source. We've linked it with the enterprise architect, a data modeling tool, and Erwin.

It is important to us that Purview can connect to Android devices and data in other software-as-a-service apps. We've connected to Snowflake, Erwin, Oracle, DB2, and more. Name any database, and we've probably connected to it.

It is crucial that Purview offers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments like AWS and GSP. The solution has an analytics space for data governance. It helps identify who should have access to specific fields. 

Another beneficial feature is the data catalog. It allows us to streamline and classify data, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access it. 

Purview integrates natively with Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365, which is also a remarkable feature. We connected to Office 365 Excel files and even accessed a few emails for a proof of concept. We also linked it with Microsoft Power BI. Most Microsoft products have a very good amalgamation.

There is room for improvement when it comes to Purview's data connector platform in supporting ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources.

Microsoft has done an impressive job. I've been in this domain for over 15 years and have used IBM's data governance tool in the past. Microsoft's current offering sets a baseline with features like data governance catalogs and connectivity to various tools.

The product is evolving, and there are some bugs, especially in lineage data lineage and adding parameters. It's maturing, and the data lineage needs improvement. While connecting to Microsoft products is a piece of cake, connecting to external ones, like Snowflake, is more challenging. 

I work for one of the biggest healthcare companies. I've been working on their project for probably almost one and a half to two years now. 

I got the chance to work with Microsoft Purview a year ago.

It's very stable. I never experienced any freezes.

I've never encountered any performance slowdown. Scalability is pretty good.

The customer service and support were pretty good. I engaged with them for about six months on various topics.

Positive

I used something from IBM. We switched to Purview because licensing for the IBM solution was very expensive, and the learning curve was too high.

We have a separate dev ops team. I was part of the discussions from a dev manager perspective but not directly involved in the deployment process. 

When we did the proof of concept, we had about three endpoints. We deployed it in two locations, North Carolina and somewhere in the central, both East and Central.

It's a SaaS model, so it doesn't require any maintenance. Moreover, we deployed it on a private cloud since we work on state government solutions.

I have seen a 100% return on investment.

The pricing is decent. It is neither too low nor too high. Given its capabilities, the pricing is justified.

We previously used the IBM infrastructure but as we are a premium partner with Microsoft, we collaborated with them and began exploring Purview.

Since it is still maturing, I would rate it an eight out of ten. It's a wonderful tool, I would advise everyone to explore it from the data governance perspective.

We are a partner and work with different organizations. We go through a number of activity phases, such as initial discovery, understanding their data to see what is and is not sensitive, and then using Microsoft Purview. 

We use Microsoft Purview to provide sensitive information in building out a roadmap in terms of classification, protection, and lifecycle management. We then determine what kind of use case is most common for other work we would look for and fill in the gaps with the customer. Microsoft Purview's vast features and capabilities really depend on what we learn in those workshops and where that organization is looking to go over a period of time. So if one of the key areas is the mitigation or prevention of data breaches, we can help with that. 

We can also help protect content, especially when it is sensitive and involves individuals. We can also help businesses change their processes to help ensure users know what their preferences are and how to use the user tools.

Microsoft Purview's ability to deliver data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, including AWS and GCP, is very important. It helps organizations realize the investments they have already made and how they can further expand those investments to another remote type of Microsoft workflow. Microsoft Connect has been used to centralize these workflows, and the ability to import existing records management processes and policies into the file plan in Microsoft Purview allows organizations to bring compliance into a central location. This helps to manage costs and improve efficiency, as users can go to one area to leverage basic facilities without having to use separate tools.

It is important for our clients that Microsoft Purview can connect to iOS and Android devices. With many people now working from home and using their own devices, there is a need to manage these devices. Microsoft Purview's conditional access and endpoint management capabilities help organizations to protect their data, regardless of the device being used.

Purview's natively integrated compliance across Azure Dynamics 365 and Office 365 is important. However, it is also important to ensure data privacy with its data as a whole from a compliance perspective. This means ensuring that we can meet the requirements of 2701 controls and that people know the processes, technology, and relevant skills. CRM controls information about potential customers and opportunities, so it is important to ensure that we are compliant when handling this data. We also need to make sure that updates to Purview are made as needed and that our team is able to stay on Office 365. Having a strong compliance program is essential for any organization that handles sensitive data. By taking the necessary steps to ensure compliance, we can protect our data and our customers.

It is critical that Purview is built around global regulations. This is because we have different types of customers, some of whom operate slowly. There is a rack with some regulations, and we have the US. We also have a rack with different regulations that are up-to-date, but they are only safe in some areas. This means that we need to be able to control, face, or bank on system regulations. This is very important to me and the customer because they can be very tricky.

Purview's DLP can be used to remediate policy violations. A number of kinds of DLP rules can be leveraged, such as sensitivity labels, data classification, and sensitive information protection plans. This means that it is not enough to simply provide people with the technology, they also need to be trained on how to use it effectively. Through the use of an ERP system, a number of policies can be set up. This insight can then be used to make meaningful decisions about how to rate the data on the system. This will help to understand how the data is costing the organization. If the organization does not have the necessary internal controls in place, new protection and encryption measures may need to be implemented. This is primarily becoming step one in the process of working policies, understanding how the data is being used, making decisions about how to protect it, and then building a protection layer on top of that.

Data loss prevention education for users is important because it can help them to understand how to best protect sensitive data. This can be done by providing users with training on how to use DLP tools and policies, as well as by educating them about the risks of data loss. DLP tools can help to prevent data loss by monitoring user activity and blocking unauthorized access to sensitive data. DLP policies can help to define what constitutes sensitive data and how it should be protected. By educating users about DLP and the risks of data loss, organizations can help to create a culture of data security. This can help to prevent data breaches and protect the organization's data assets.

Purview helped reduce the number of solutions we need to interact with each other. I used the solution that crosses between Endpoint Data Loss Prevention, Microsoft Defender for Data, and Conditional Access to block specific types of information at different workloads. This made it easier to manage sensitive information. For example, if I have sensitive information today, I can easily block people from uploading it to Teams, SharePoint, or OneDrive.

The reduction in the number of solutions we need to interact with each other has had a significant impact on our pricing. In the past, we had to use a variety of different solutions to manage our portals, which was time-consuming and expensive. Now that everything is coming into Microsoft Purview, we are able to simplify our technical and environmental environment. This allowed us to reduce our costs and improve our efficiency. In addition, Microsoft Purview provides us with a central location to manage our data governance. This made it easier for us to comply with regulations and protect our data. Overall, Microsoft Purview has been a major asset to our organization.

Microsoft Purview expanded our visibility into our state by allowing us to see what is labeled, relabeled, and what is not classified. There are a number of different areas where Purview improved capability and overall cost. These are all different aspects of Purview, which is helpful for organizations. Purview has a point-in-time view, and it also has the ability to explore more granular data from the logs.

Purview helps to reduce the time it takes to take action on insider threats by around 50 percent. It requires planning and configuration, as well as two weeks of setup. The technical configuration is used to identify users and the types of activities they are performing. For example, users who sign into hundreds of documents within a few minutes of each other or delete large numbers of documents can be quickly identified and flagged. This allows security teams to send high-priority emails to the appropriate people in a timely manner.

Purview helps save our clients between 30 to 40 percent of time and money. 

Microsoft Purview's most valuable feature is its ability to identify content across a number of prescribed regulatory frameworks, including Microsoft, GDPR, PII, and UCC Financial. It can also help organizations identify content that is important to them but not specifically regulated. This is done by creating trainable classifiers and sensitive information types. The protection controls components are based on the perspective of the device. Microsoft Purview has been growing in popularity over the past few years, and it offers a number of tools that can help organizations manage their data.

Purview's data loss prevention for macOS endpoints has some limitations, and the end-user experience of recovering from a failure is lacking.

I would like to be able to search for labels using Purview to see what items are affected and the time periods in which they will be active. This would allow us to export the results for specific business areas, which would make our lives a lot easier. We could also use this information to identify sensitive information types and reduce false positives.

The utility system format, the policy tips and user descriptions of sensitivity labels, and the overall policy tips that are shown in the loss prevention policy have room for improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for three years.

The stability of Purview has been good. It takes a bit of time for someone to configure it, but once it is configured, it is responsive. However, there are sometimes delays due to the speed of users' devices and their home network connections. This can be especially true for mobile devices and when users are using multiple apps at the same time. Microsoft also sometimes experiences delays in processing requests, which can lead to further delays in Purview. Overall, Purview is a stable platform with good uptime and resilience.

In terms of scaling Microsoft Purview, there are two main challenges: network load and data ingestion. Network load can be a problem if there are too many requests coming into the system. This can be addressed by adding more servers to handle the load. Data ingestion can also be a challenge if the company is generating a lot of data. This can be addressed by using virtual machines to store and process the data. As the amount of data grows, the number of VMs can be increased to keep up.

Our clients vary in size from 100 all the way up to 6,000.

Each setup is different. We have thousands of workshops, configurations, and design agreements followed by a baseline to mitigate of about 30 percent which we build on top of. The deployments can take anywhere between a few hours to a few months. We need to understand each organization to ensure that they understand the type of people process that is in place. Then, depending on the technology, we need to make sure that they have access to 365. This is implemented as a baseline, and our target operating model is also needed to ensure that they have the necessary functions. This will allow me to deal with the environment. We need a team of people to manage the deployment.

We implement the solution for our clients. Microsoft Purview is managed in a single location.

Microsoft Purview does not require any maintenance.

Our client's have seen a 100 percent return on investment. 

The pricing depends on the client's requirements and the number of applications.

I give Microsoft Purview an eight out of ten.

It is difficult to assess how much AI and automation affect our speed and accuracy of risk detection. This is because the effectiveness of AI and automation depends on how we train the system. There are a lot of sensitive information types that are prescribed by Microsoft. There are also a number of types that fit within another structure of sharing information. So potentially, we have a number of false positives, which means that we are relying solely on the information provided by the system. This is not something that I would push on an organization. Once we start updating the system, we need to make sure that we understand and compare the number of activities to identify and fine-tune the system. We need to do this a number of times before we can be really sure that the system knows our data. We also need to consider the AI side of things, which obviously allows for some risk. The identification of risk seems to be a matter of realizing confidence in the system's predictions.

It is difficult to assess how Microsoft Purview's AI and automation affect the quality of insights that we have. We have run this process effectively a number of times across different organizations, but this has raised some doubts. This is a bit of a shame, especially with the out-of-the-box solution from Microsoft. We are then asked to hold a number of workshops to review the results. This is because the system can operate with different accuracy levels and false positives. It is important to consider how we portray these insights and what the next steps will be. As a result, there are mixed reviews.

Currently, Purview does not enable us to view our compliance in real-time without some additional work to enable us to show compliance. This is because the visual displays rely on the time it takes to update the Microsoft SQL database, which can be delayed. We have seen cases where the displays do not reflect the actual data, and we have had to manually update the database to correct the issue. However, we can clearly see what data is due for disposition, deletion, and retention based on our policies. While it is not always easy to see this information, we have made improvements to make it easier. Overall, it is not a straightforward process, but we are working to improve it.

I recommend Microsoft Purview, but organizations should always conduct a proof of concept to ensure that their requirements can all be met before implementing the solution.

We use it to integrate the audit log with Power Platform to extract all the relevant information and explore to what extent we can enforce certain retention and sensitivity levels. We need to enforce those levels on data locations like Microsoft Dataverse. We also need to determine how to process SharePoint lists that are being fed by Power Apps or Power Automate flows.

I also work with a lot of legal departments, and we're working on legal matter management, where documents need to be retained for a certain amount of time and then they need to be processed.

On a scale of one to 10, I would have to rate it at least an eight when it comes to protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments. If its execution were more perfect, I would even give it a 10. These days, there are too many people with administrative passwords and credentials. Purview relieves a lot of the pressure from having multiple people in the field with knowledge of several topics. We can reduce that by at least 30 percent, if not 60 percent. I'm not a fan of having too many people with the keys to the castle. Purview enables an administrator with a small team to manage a group of 20,000 people.

One of our major clients is in banking and insurance, and we would not be able to deploy a lot of the Microsoft products if not for the exact commitment by Microsoft to take into account critical regulations from around the world. Obviously, since Microsoft is a U.S.-based company, they're going to first launch their products and their infrastructure based on U.S. data centers, which is exactly what we can't have under the GDPR law.

Also, with respect to vulnerability management, a lot of pressure is taken off the administrator when using Microsoft Purview or infusing Purview with information from the Security Center to give you a manageable overview of a lot of numbers.

I really like the entire system for auto-labeling content. It's a very refined system. I use the Keyword Query Language to define refined string-based metadata, and then I can really go deep into the specific data with the specific properties labeled in such and such a way. That's a very good basis for the use cases that I have. That gives me a lot of leeway and a lot of freedom to really enclose a lot of specific use cases.

Another thing I'm very much a fan of is the notion of machine-learning-based labeling. However, as with syntax, which I'm a big user of as well, the automatic machine-learning-based labeling and identification still requires you to do a lot of work to make it work. But you can really fine-tune it, and I love that part.

Beyond the labeling, when talking about the audit log, what I very much like is that it's very well integrated. You can use the audit log to focus and zoom in on your needs. You can use querying and a lot of good filtering on that as well. I use it for a lot of regulatory processes where I need to figure out who accessed what document at what time, after which changes. I really love that. From a single place I can manage pretty much our entire regulatory system. I'm a compliance-focused person. I work a lot with the GDPR law in Europe. Purview allows for a lot of AI-based identification of GDPR-sensitive data. That really helps with organizations such as one of my clients, which is an organization with 20,000 knowledge workers.

As long as we stay within the Microsoft ecosystem, natively integrated compliance is absolute legend. It's a divine ability to have a clear view of what's happening in our tenant. I love every aspect of it. You can set rules and different forms of triggers to implement automated actions based on exports from the audit logs, as well as alerts that you trigger for anything that is happening in your Microsoft ecosystem. That is extremely valuable. That is what enables you to go from needing 10 people to administer an environment to needing three. There's a lot of financial gain there, as well as control over human error.

In addition, when you look at vulnerability management, there are multiple options for a point-based, almost gamification-based system. You just need to tick these boxes and that will get you X points. I want to work towards more than 80 percent compliance and more than 80 percent of the vulnerabilities managed. To get to that point, and to have a clear overview, is very difficult when handling thousands of users and thousands of devices. But turning those numbers into graphics and statistics that even make sense to your management is a capability of Microsoft Purview. If you need to implement changes, there are numbers there that non-IT management and business staff can understand.

My specialty is not in explaining to management what the risks are of having something break or what gain there is in mitigating a vulnerability. However, Microsoft Purview helps you have an overall perspective of your IT landscape.

If you feel that an organization needs to evolve in a certain way, you want to try and explain a vulnerability from a technical perspective. For example, we might need to exchange this key with that key, or move to customer-owned keys. You can't explain to them why they should invest because they don't understand these technical issues. But Purview is very strong at showing you statistics. It shows you that this issue is present in X percent of the users or Y percent of the devices. It then enables you to implement those changes with rules and so that you don't have to manually configure the changes for every user or device. Purview fits perfectly into that approach because it tells you which groups of people have active issues.

I would like to see it connect more. The macOS-related audit logs are extensive for the M365 ecosystem. But when we're talking about managed devices, I'm missing the capabilities that you have with monitoring both Android and Windows-based devices. In a perfect world, if Apple and Microsoft could get along a little better and have more extensive information in that audit for Apple-based products, we would have a perfect machine. I don't see how there would be another best-in-class candidate.

Also, my focus is mainly on SAP, ServiceNow, and Jira connectivity. And for those, we do still employ non-Microsoft solutions. I would love to integrate everything with SIEM into Microsoft Sentinel, but we can't push that through with a large client just yet. While I like the effort that is being put into non-Microsoft data sources, I'm not always happy with the information that is available.

By comparison, the level of detail that I have in our SharePoint environment is perfect visibility of what everyone is doing. When we're talking about Windows devices, I have perfect visibility into what they're doing with their devices. I lose a little bit of that control when we're talking about third-party connectors. Compliance-wise, I would like to see more ability to audit from a user perspective, where I could extrapolate what the user was thinking or trying to do. That would allow me to enforce rules that are less restrictive. I would like to give as much freedom as possible, as long as people are not acting with bad intent.

Purview enables you to let go of—I would not call them "unnecessary staff"; but we always have to downsize where possible. We can now do the work of 10 administrators with only three. We can now manage a 5,000-user environment with just one administrator on Purview. That gives us a lot of leeway in project budget to focus on expanding and improving the network, the setup, and user adoption as well. In a company of 5,000 users, being able to let go of one administrator enables you to set up a "champion" program and educate your users. You can't just block users from doing things that are wrong. You have to teach them how to use the product in the correct way. Microsoft Purview, the way it has been evolving, enables you to do that.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for about a year and a half.

This is a cloud product, so there might be frustration sometimes with certain functionalities not being optimally functional. But specifically with Microsoft Purview, I have yet to encounter a single sign-in log that is not present. I have yet to encounter any activity logs that are not present. I have yet to encounter any missing data when I need to do a checkup.

Would I like the data to be more up-to-date, when management is breathing down my neck, to see what happened in the last five minutes? Yes. It would make my life easier, but I do not feel that is the technology's responsibility. I would never put that on Microsoft Purview.

People often and unjustly say that Microsoft product pricing is not in the scope of reality, that it's just too expensive at times. I do not feel that is the case at all. The difference between an E3 and an E5 license, with regard to how much control you have, is very significant. If I'm able to let go of 30 to 70 percent of my IT administration staff, that makes up for a lot of money. That makes up for a lot more than a monthly subscription. 

The pricing system of Microsoft Purview allows for profit more than it is a financial drain. You have to organize your organization well. You can't just keep the old mentality. You have to change your way of working. You have to rely less on people who can make errors and more on setting up the right configuration and thinking ahead. You need to create a future-proof setup with your configuration and your rules. There is an initial investment attached to it, but within one to two years you get that investment back, so it's very easy money.

For a SIEM solution, we use Splunk at the moment with one of our clients, which is more of an integration system than what Purview is when it comes to monitoring your entire environment. You can set up alerts and automation, as well as automated actions, in Purview. With Splunk, if you use custom connectors and integrate it with an Azure app, sure, you can build an entire custom solution to replace Microsoft Purview. But you would have to manage it, and it's just not worth it. I don't see a reason, when you're inside the Microsoft ecosystem, to not use Microsoft Purview.

Although I have not used Purview for data loss protection, I am part of a team that is working on custom data loss protection solutions. Currently, if you want to check every email going in and out in detail, its data loss prevention capabilities are not ticking all the boxes. However, if you want to have the ability to generally control who can open a file on an unmanaged device, or set up rules such that, if someone cannot log in with their credentials and does not prove that they are part of our tenant, then they cannot open a given file, that's something I love. The watermarking is great because, even within your organization, you're able to prove and show to users that they should know that this is a protected document.You can set up campaigns to educate your users.

In terms of the number of solutions we need to have interact with each other, in the past, we would have to set up different logging solutions. I even had to build custom logging solutions in the Microsoft ecosystem. I used Power Platform to build them. One little flaw right now is that the product could go into a little bit more detail in the audit logging. I was able to pretty much solve my use case for logging regarding a legal regulatory document management system using Power Automate flows.

We use Microsoft Purview to protect sensitive transactional data. We can control organizational policies such as who can monitor the system and how data is shared between managed apps and enrolled devices. We create the data loss prevention policy.

Purview can deliver data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments. For example, we can set up a multitenant environment across different vendors and control Purview through Azure. Our enterprise licensing allows us to extend the connectors and tokens to other vendors. Once the connectors are active, they streamline the same functionalities and policies across the data on the other clouds.

Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, Android devices, and other SaaS apps, provided that we have created enrollment profiles for the other devices in Microsoft Azure. We can then monitor those devices from a central Microsoft location.

Microsoft Purview's natively integrated compliance across Azure Dynamics 365 and Office 365 is important because all escalation auto breaches from Microsoft or our data loss prevention policy will be highlighted to our program manager and portfolio manager. Therefore, we must treat this as a service-level agreement breach. The most important thing is to ensure that we are alerted whenever sensitive data is sent across 18 servers, Microsoft Office 365, or by people using their hybrid environment to connect to Office 365.

It is important that Purview was built taking into account the critical regulations from around the world because one of the accounts I support is a financial institution from the UK with offices in Europe. As a result, we have new regulations to comply with. We had a different region-wide DLP setup for the UK and Europe, but we needed to ensure that it was within the new Purview system and that data could not move out of it. To achieve this, we have people in Europe working on certain governance and risk portfolios that we have created using Microsoft Azure and Purview. We also share this information with our audit team, which comes in from outside to verify it every quarter.

We have an in-house process for handling policy violations. Purview's DLP for remediating policy violations helps us. For certain categories of transactional and social ethics violations, we capture data on any copying of sensitive data. This is because sensitive data should not be shared. We capture this data using our exchange server. It is difficult to share sensitive data, but we can capture it. We then share this data with our ombudsman team. The ombudsman team will review the data, including the timestamps and users involved, and determine what action to take. In rare cases, the person responsible for the violation may be removed from the team or organization.

Awareness of mobile device monitoring must be shared across the organization, especially with end users who may not be aware that their actions are being monitored. Training should be provided to all users of enrolled devices, regardless of whether they use Intune or another endpoint server. There are three sets of training, End-user training, Admin training, and Global provider user training.

Over the past two years, we have improved our relationship with external auditors. In the first year, it was challenging to implement DLP policies. However, in the second and third years, we have had fewer than ten violations. These violations were typically due to users accidentally accessing sensitive data without their knowledge. We have been able to significantly reduce our policy violations in the past three years using Microsoft Purview.

Purview has helped us reduce the number of solutions we need to interact with each other. We used to have a lot of L1 tickets that came in earlier, where there was a policy change or configuration change being done. And then we didn't have a proper change process or control over the data that had been accessed, because it was in a shared model. This led to SharePoint violations. Now that this has been reduced, we have proper version control, and anyone accessing these resources must check IAM. As a result, those L1 tickets, which were more than a thousand in the first year, have been reduced to less than a hundred or so, in terms of SharePoint access violations. So, this is one area where we have seen a significant drop because the IAM and the user's profile now determine whether they have read and write access.

Our visibility into our estate has improved significantly with Purview. We started a pilot project, and the project manager who owns this portfolio is already running the show, even before the policy is set for the organization itself. This level of visibility was tested in a small pilot project, and now the project manager has full visibility.

Microsoft Purview allows us to demonstrate our compliance in real time. On the default dashboard, we can see the number of phones that have violated the DLP policy that we created. We can then determine which standard was breached, such as ISO or BIS. We use Purview for weekly compliance calls with the client as well.

Purview helped streamline our meetings with compliance regulators by making it easier to share data with them.

Microsoft Purview has helped us reduce our time to action on insider threats. Before Purview, we manually managed our insider threat detection process using a weekly Excel report with a macro. This meant that if a breach occurred on Monday, we would not review the report until the following Monday, resulting in a one-week time to action. With Purview, we can now take action as soon as Purview detects the violation.

Purview has saved our admin teams 99 percent of their time spent investigating violations. In terms of cost savings, Purview is included with our E5 license. The savings are significant.

Purview helps us maintain compliance. It gives us full control over our data, and when there is a violation, we can follow our established procedures to decide whether to call the ombudsman or if the process setup is sufficient.

Purview helps mitigate risk and allows us to govern the information being shared among apps and devices. Purview can restrict access from even the smallest threats, such as a mobile device trying to access and manage apps.

I would like to have AI functionality on the dashboard to help me analyze and report on the data that we capture using Purview on a daily basis.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for three years.

Purview is stable and always available because it is a SaaS service, which means we don't have to worry about the infrastructure.

Purview is scalable depending on the number of transactions we want to monitor per day. 

Whenever we had an issue with Purview during the test phase of setting up DLP, we would call Microsoft Premium Support. They responded immediately and assigned a support engineer to our case right away. The support engineer would escalate the issue to their internal product group team, who would update Purview on the backend with a patch. The product group team would then let us know that our feedback on the product had been accepted and that they had worked on a solution, which would be released within the next week or quarter along with other updates. Overall, we were very pleased with their support.

Positive

Before Microsoft Purview, we used a feature in Intune called data analytics to record what users access and the transactions they perform. However, this data was not meaningful, and there was no way to filter it to identify breaches. As a result, we had to manually review all of the transactions for all users in the organization to see if any were violations.

Microsoft Purview is able to capture breaches because we use tags to properly understand the data and identify violations. For example, we can tag all transactions involving credit card numbers. When we run the ETL tool, it uses the tags to identify transactions that may be violations.

Initially, deployment will occur once the data is confirmed by the ETL team and properly ingested. This process typically takes a few weeks, depending on the volume of data. Once the initial deployment is complete, we will design and test the DLP and UAT systems. This process typically takes two weeks to a month.

Once it is deployed to production, any future changes or updates must be approved by a cabinet review board, and we must have a rollback plan in case anything affects production.

We have eight engineers who work at different levels to ensure that the data is furnished correctly, regardless of whether it is structured or unstructured, how it is being populated, or where the data loss prevention process runs daily. We also have a couple of managers and a scrum leader, as well as a portfolio manager.

When we implemented Purview, we were able to reduce our staff by 60 percent. We no longer need compliance officers to manually check spreadsheets for changes or breaches. In addition to the staff reduction, we have SLAs that require us to pay penalties to our clients if there is a violation. With Purview, the number of SLA breaches has been significantly reduced, saving our organization over one million dollars.

Microsoft Purview requires a Microsoft 365 license and is included with an E5 license. The license is expensive, but it is worth the cost because of all the tools it includes.

I would rate Microsoft Purview nine out of ten.

Purview is a cloud-based SaaS product. We keep our sensitive data on-premises, but we export a de-identified version (.NET) to the cloud in order to review reports for violations.

I recommend Microsoft Purview, especially for organizations that are already using Azure. Purview can be used to extend their risk governance capabilities in a seamless manner. There are other solutions available, but Purview is flexible and offers hybrid, cloud, and on-premises options with connectors for other vendors.