Microsoft Purview Data Governance Reviews

The use cases for the solution include data governance, metadata management, creating business grocery, doing data lineage out of the data within the entire data stack and technology stack, and, at the same time, creating data stewardship using the policy procedures. We're implementing the policy procedures, and using workflows for automating the task. 

The organization really doesn't have any security solution, however, they want to start their journey. It's an easier way to get started if they are already on the Microsoft side. It allows them to start with basic, common capabilities.

The inheritance feature is very good.

It is user-friendly. It’s cloud native and uses the Azure Stack which makes the deployment easy.

The documentation is very exhaustive. Anyone can go ahead and try different use cases.

Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, including AWS and GCP. Many organizations have a Windows operating system along with other Microsoft protection capabilities. The integration with risk and compliance is good. Microsoft has been across various areas of product expertise and covered everything under its umbrella.

It is important that Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices, and data in other SaaS apps. It makes it easier to integrate everything. You don’t have to be specific to Microsoft products. It makes it more flexible.

It is important to us that Purview has taken into account critical regulations from around the world. They have captured most of the popular ones that are there. Many of the solutions still don't have this entire capability. When it comes to regulation and compliance, they have tried to get the most out of it and it’s included as part of PowerEdge.

We use the solution for data loss protection. For remediation. on a scale of one to five, it comes to around four. The security protection component was anyway there. They are just building on top of that and building above that.

Purview data loss protection is good at educating users on how best to handle sensitive data. There are learning and training modules available, which are helpful. It is still not there among the leaders as there are some organizations that are purely security solutions. Still, they have an edge over human identity governance. While they are not the leaders yet, they are trying to be there by trying to continuously improve and trying to provide the best of their capabilities.

Purview has helped us to reduce the number of solutions we need to interact with to some extent. Basically, it tries to solve some of the common problems raised with respect to governance.

The solution has helped improve visibility. It’s taking us to maturity level three by having the visibility aspects in place.

We haven’t used AI too much. The classification components are primarily being used. Other than that, it does have some features when it comes to text mining and identifying the EMEA site. To some extent, they have those AI capabilities and we'll try to leverage that more. We’ve been able to remove some manual activities. It was able to solve some of the problems based on the parameters and thresholds that had been defined.

It's helped provide us with a more precise, clear understanding of our data. 

Purview enables us to handle our compliance in real time. 

It does have regulation-specific templates that could be directly used to start with the journey of doing assessments identifying the maturity and then closing the gap as part of the gap assessment.

Purview helped to reduce the time to action on insider threats to some extent. We weren’t dependent on it much yet. We’ve used other vendors and technologies for that.

We went for an enterprise module. It helps us to start the journey. With it, we can start leveraging modules as part of the overall architectural stack. It does help with that. I’m not sure how much money has been saved just yet. However, there has been a fair bit of savings of both time and money.

To some extent, it has really helped us stay on top of compliance. Before, we had to do it manually. Having templates helps. It helps management understand whether we are compliant or not and can help work to close the gaps.

Non-Microsoft use cases are not very high. It's limited for now. They are continuously trying to evolve and trying to provide the latest right now. It is mature only on the more popular open source kind of applications or source tools. That is a limitation that it brings in. That said, if you already have a complete Microsoft stack then it will work really well.

They still need more coverage on Microsoft Dynamics 365. It's an area they are still working on. 

The lineage data capabilities could be improved. They need data quality as a solution. They need to have that as part of their suite. 

If I want to drive governance and adoption, when it comes to dashboarding and understanding maturity, it still needs work. There are other better, more competitive tools. 

I've been using the solution for the last five years. 

The solution has been stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

We do have personnel in-house that take care of any technical issues for the most part. Technical support is good when we do need help. There is documentation, FAQs, and chats, et cetera. When we reach out, we get support within 24 to 48 hours. Sometimes to get to the answers takes some time. 

Neutral

I've used other solutions such as Informatica, Collibra, and One Trust, among others. 

We had multiple use cases. Some organizations already had a strategic alignment with Microsoft Azure, and it made sense to go with Purview. Others felt it was a good option since it provides both governance and security. Many wanted to keep Microsoft as a strategic partner as well.

Purview is great in that it supports your stack, is cloud-native, and works directly with the Microsoft suite. Since it supports most options in an organization, it becomes easier to integrate so that we can gain that visibility.

The deployment requires an Azure enterprise account and is taken care of by one person and an Azure administrator. It's very easy. You just need to follow the steps and work with the Azure administrator.

Once it's set up, you get your users set up and define your rules. You need to deploy policies, et cetera, and go through a series of steps to ensure everything is ready and users are onboarded correctly. There are multiple strategies you can take on later - for example, decentralized and piecemeal approaches. 

We have different scenarios including production and development environments. We have different strategies to keep different environments in sync and do quarterly checkups where we identify certain areas and departments to add. 

Maintenance is only needed for larger organizations that are more mature. There is no separate maintenance; it's all under the same license. 

The ROI has been very high and can be measured in many ways. We measure ROI based on the organizational maturity and data-related use cases. 

The cost is completely based on the number of users and the subscriptions that it provides. Also, the technology stack and how much data you have or how many connectors you are using, et cetera. There are a lot of different types of factors to consider when calculating cost. Since we went for more of a pay-as-you-go model, it is based on consumption.

More complex organizations use more data and therefore the pricing will be different from smaller, less complex organizations. 

I have been a partner and implementor, however, right now, I am more of an end-user.

We are working with the SaaS version of the solution. 

I'd advise others to take time and understand both this and competitor solutions. Consider the use case you are solving for. 

I would rate the solution seven out of ten. 

Our primary use case of Microsoft Purview is data discovery and scanning data sources.

Microsoft Purview is a cloud-based service on Azure, but the way it scans data sources is hybrid. While Purview itself resides in the cloud, some on-premises servers called integration runtimes are deployed within Purview to scan specific data sources. These on-premises servers are essential for making those sources accessible to Purview for further management and governance. In essence, Purview leverages a hybrid approach for data source scanning, but everything else about the service operates entirely in the cloud.

Microsoft Purview's data connector platform for handling non-Microsoft data sources effectively addresses our data ingestion requirements.

Purview affects the visibility we have into our estate. It is the primary reason why we use the solution.

While Microsoft Purview doesn't directly provide revenue, it saves our business money by improving efficiency. Imagine we're launching a marketing campaign and need customer or product data. Before Purview, we'd have to search for existing reports, unsure if they even exist. Now, Purview lets us see all reports, who created them, and when they were updated. This saves us time by eliminating manual data searches, ultimately reducing costs because people's time is valuable.

Purview's greatest benefit for us is data discovery. Even someone unfamiliar with our data can use Purview's basic keyword search to find relevant data sources. Purview then reveals details like data points, who maintains the source, update frequency, record and data point counts, columns, and data types – all this metadata is instantly available, making Purview our primary tool for data discovery.

While Microsoft Purview currently allows weekly scans for data sources, this limitation hinders the usefulness of the tool for frequently changing data. Ideally, Purview should offer daily scan frequencies to better accommodate these dynamic environments.

Microsoft should provide full access to log details, particularly those related to technical aspects of data source integration. Hiding information from technical users assumes a lack of understanding on their part, which isn't the case. While Microsoft claims Purview is under constant development and some features lack documentation, this shouldn't prevent transparency, especially for established functionalities we rely on.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for nearly one year.

Microsoft Purview is stable.

Microsoft Purview meets our scaling needs.

The error codes displayed by the user interface weren't detailed enough to diagnose a problem we had, so we contacted technical support for help. Even with some internal information, we couldn't properly debug the issue. Microsoft then examined their internal logs to provide more details about the error message, which was all we needed. Once we saw the additional log information, we were able to pinpoint the exact problem and fix it.

Neutral

Since Purview is an Azure service, enabling it for our company was simple for IT. Once activated, I became the collection admin, and data admin, and assumed all the associated Purview roles. Setting up the first data scan for our reports and data sources was surprisingly easy, even without any prior experience, though being technical helped! The process is entirely point-and-click with no coding required.

The week-long deployment involved collaboration with our IT network team to handle resources behind corporate firewalls, while I managed the remaining tasks, bringing the total number involved to three.

While we evaluated various data discovery and analytics solutions, particularly open-source options, we ultimately chose Microsoft Purview due to its seamless integration with our existing Azure Stack environment. Since Purview was already included in some of our corporate Microsoft agreements, it offered a cost-effective and user-friendly starting point for our data discovery needs.

I would rate Microsoft Purview eight out of ten.

While our data platform handles governance and privacy, we use Microsoft Purview specifically for data discovery. It helps us scan existing governed data sources and make them discoverable through various methods like keyword search, research tools, and browsing by data source. Notably, Purview provides valuable metadata, even though we don't currently leverage its compliance features.

No maintenance is required on our end.

Before considering Microsoft Purview, identify your specific data governance needs. Purview is a comprehensive solution, so pinpoint the features you require (data discovery, classification, sharing, etc.) and how they address your challenges. If you only need a few functionalities and paying extra for unused features isn't ideal, a simpler solution might suffice. However, if you plan to leverage Purview's full potential and the cost aligns with your budget, then I would recommend Purview.

We use the solution to defend endpoint workloads and prevent data loss. We also use it for governance.

One of the biggest benefits of the solution is visibility. Previously, we had a myriad of different solutions for compliance and to look at different workloads. Microsoft Purview brings all those things together in a very similar look and feel.

It also enables access management. We can provide an elevated privilege for a limited time. If the user needs privileged access, they can request it on an ad-hoc basis. We have workflows to provide access depending on different approval models. We can do all such things without elevating the risk posture.

The time to onboard is pretty short. It comes with a whole bunch of recommendations for somebody who has a small crew like me. It gives the ability to onboard the product and have a really good baseline to begin with. All I have to do is three or four clicks, and it's off and running. It is one of the greatest removers of barriers to entry. We have to be generalists, being a small shop. It's important for us to begin from a great place. Some other highlights compared to the competition are

• Unified Data Governance & Compliance
• Comprehensive Data Discovery & Cataloging
• Deep Azure Ecosystem Integration
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Insider Risk Management
• Role-Based Insights and Access Control

The tool's Windows PC offerings are far better compared to the granularity on the Mac side. The product must provide better integrations with OS X and iOS. There must be feature parity. The product must also provide better integrations with other ecosystems. I'd love to see Microsoft integrating with Google Workspace, at least in the EDU K-12 space. Most people in the EDU space use Google Workspace and Microsoft. Extending the capabilities of Purview would be phenomenal. to summarize, 

• Limited functionality on macOS (e.g., sensitivity labels not fully supported in all Office apps)
• Inconsistent feature parity across platforms (Windows vs. macOS vs. web)
• UI complexity and steep learning curve for new users

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I have been using the solution for five years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable.

The support must be improved. Unfortunately, a lot of times, it's a hit or miss. With the breadth of their customer base, much of it must be diverted to third-party consultants. I almost dread it when I see an email from a third-party vendor. When you're an insider, you have much better access to resources than a consultant.

Positive

We were using Barracuda DLP for email filtering and file sharing. We switched to Microsoft Purview to bring it all under one umbrella.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I have a few friends in the industry who've done this. We did a proof of concept, began small, looked at the pros and cons, and expanded it.

The product saves us time and effort. We can easily access Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft 365 and see the violations. It has easier and fewer workflows. Otherwise, we would have had to go into individual users' file systems and look for violations.

The solution is extremely affordable for the K-12 space.

We evaluated solutions for individual silos, but we did not evaluate a cohesive unit like Microsoft Purview. Microsoft is extremely affordable for the K-12 space. It was a no-brainer to onboard Purview to peer across different workloads.

Barracuda Email Security was pretty good. The problem was that it was a single solution. It doesn't extend across our data estate. Purview has a vast and rich ecosystem.

It is extremely important that Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud environments. They currently do GCP and AWS, but not necessarily Google Workspace. I'm hoping that it'll be their next natural extension.

It is very important to us that Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world. Since we work in the K-12 space, we deal with minors. It is important to protect their identity and privacy and have their well-being and the nationwide and statewide regulations at the forefront. It's very important for us to be compliant, not just from a compliance perspective, but also to protect the needs of children.

Insider risk is a big challenge. Many people want to share and communicate. There's a balance between communicating and oversharing confidential information. It's reasonable to expect a teacher to know all those nuances. A policy that can oversee and provide guardrails to users is very important. A feedback mechanism for the end user to act on would be very helpful.

We can see across different systems without too much effort. It is very important to us. Purview enables us to show our compliance in real-time. The security score helps me compare myself to other organizations. Being able to identify a gap and fill it is super helpful. As a small organization, our audits are more financial in nature.

More than time and money, the tool has increased accountability within the organization. We can have proactive conversations about data security. The product provides me with a 300% return on investment.

It is critical for us that Purview connects to iOS, Mac, and Android devices. Large organizations can have separate IT sections for different departments. As a smaller organization, our ability to support different needs across different SaaS applications and platforms through Purview is important.

The ability to peer more into heterogeneous environments is an area of growth for the solution. It is a must-have.

Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

We use Microsoft Purview to protect and govern our information.

It is important for Microsoft Purview to provide data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, including AWS and GCP. I have been a consultant for a year and a half, advising mostly European enterprise customers. All customers, from mid-sized to larger, have diverse storage solutions. Therefore, it is important for Microsoft Purview to be flexible enough to be applied to various environments, such as multi-cloud. Although the product is not yet there, it is important to many business customers.

The enterprise IT landscape is diverse, with various devices, SaaS applications, and multi-cloud solutions. Protecting and governing information is a need that spans all of these touchpoints and Microsoft Purview helps us do that.

Purview's native integration with Azure Dynamics 365 and Office 365 is essential because many organizations use these Microsoft products. This native integration is unmatched by other solutions.

Purview DataOps Protection does a great job of remediating policy violations. It has a comprehensive reporting and fine-tuning integration that allows us to track policy violations effectively. Overall, I think it does a great job of protecting data.

Purview recently improved in the area of DLP. These tips are now available across different platforms, such as Office and Outlook, and they are getting better. This is helpful in educating users about policies. 

Microsoft Purview helped us control the growth of data, reduce dark data, and better protect against the filtration of data.

Purview increased our visibility into our other Microsoft solutions.

We use AI and automation sparingly. This is not part of Purview directly, but an AI tool that helps us determine if data is redundant or has business value before we move it to Azure or Microsoft 365. We use the AI tool in a very limited way, such as trainable classifiers. We also have the option to use another product called Syntex in collaboration with Purview, but this has not been explored much.

Technically Purview can enable us to show our compliance in real-time.

Purview reduced the time it takes us to act on insider threats by almost 90 percent. Previously, many violations were not reported or took months to be reported. Now, we can act on violations almost instantly, or within days.

Microsoft Purview partially helps organizations stay on top of compliance. The platform provides a number of technical features that can be used to manage compliance, but it is up to organizations to implement these features and take the necessary steps to ensure compliance.

Microsoft Information Protection uses sensitivity labels to classify and protect sensitive information. MIP works together with Data Loss Prevention to prevent sensitive information from being leaked outside of the organization. MIP also helps to mitigate insider risk by preventing unauthorized users from accessing sensitive information.

Purview's data connectivity platform has a good set of connectors for ingesting data from non-Microsoft data sources. However, it still falls short in terms of coverage of other systems. It is mostly integrated with the Microsoft stack, but there are connectors to other systems and sources of information. Overall, Purview is not a one-stop shop for protecting company information.

I am not sure that Purview was built with compliance guidelines in mind. It does have a component called Compliance Manager, which allows us to track our adherence to different standards, such as security and privacy standards around the globe. However, this is more of an add-on. I think there is still a significant gap between the technical capabilities of Purview and the ability to drive compliance or prove compliance through its use. I think this is a major gap that Microsoft does not adequately address. Purview is not a GRC tool. It is a set of security features, labeling features, and lifecycle features that do not come close to GRC tooling in terms of functionality. Additionally, there is no strong integration with the compliance framework, either in terms of rolling it out or proving our adherence to it.

I would like to see improvements to the compliance manager, such as making it easier to start small and grow over time. This is not possible at this time.

The current event-based retention management is very poor. This is an area that needs improvement. We need to be able to more natively or near natively label content for retention and sensitivity across other lines of business systems like Workday and ServiceNow. This would allow us to extend labeling to those applications and make it native. This would be of great benefit to our clients.

Purview's DLP protection has some downsides. One downside is that the tips only appear in native applications. This means that users will not see them in other applications, such as web browsers. Another downside is that the tips only cover a subset of all the information. This means that users may still need to seek out additional information elsewhere.

The technical support has room for improvement.

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

Microsoft Purview is extremely stable.

Microsoft Purview is highly scalable.

The first level of support is not very knowledgeable and it is hard to get proper support because of the procedures in place.

Neutral

The initial deployment was complex, but not because of technical difficulties. The main challenge was engaging end users and getting them to adopt the new system. This was because the system required them to think about information in a new way. The deployment took around 12 months and required five to ten people working two days a week.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The return on investment is very good for what Purview offers, but it does lack some of the features that other solutions have. For example, if we're replacing something that already exists, we could do something cheaper or quicker. However, the value of this solution is in its ability to mitigate risk. If we don't have any type of classification and security in place, we're always opening ourselves up to risks. The cost of this solution is high, but the cost of not having it could be much higher. The return on investment is around 200 percent.

Some people find the tier licensing system complicated, but it offers a lot of value for money if we use the features. In fact, many clients who use the E5 licenses find that they can get a better return on investment on those licenses. Once they do, they find that the tier licensing system is very fairly priced.

I give Microsoft Purview an eight out of ten.

Time to value is quite long, especially when it impacts end users and requires new skills and knowledge. This is especially true in IT departments and on the business side. However, once the value is realized, the return on investment can be very good.

This type of solution is deployed across the entire Microsoft 365 tenant. It also has an Azure side, which is two things across that tenant as well. There is no area where it is used more or less. However, there is more interest in the areas of security and privacy. Therefore, legal, HR and IT are the most likely places to deploy this solution. Finance and merger and acquisition are also areas where people have more interest in deploying Purview. However, it is normally deployed across the entire organization.

We have around 30 clients consisting of anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000 users.

The maintenance is overseen by a full-time compliance technical person and a compliance business person.

I would advise assessing the maturity of the people and processes before using these types of tools. The technical side of things is not too complicated but we need to have the people and processes in place to classify all of our information and to ensure that our policies are being triggered. This can be a challenge for many organizations, as most have dark data, especially on structured clients. Ultimately, it is the people and the processes that make the success of these tools, not the technology itself.

We use the platform to comply with regulations, and our specific use cases are information protection, information governance, data loss prevention, and insider risk mitigation.

The information protection and data loss prevention functions help our end users be fully aware of the sensitivity of certain information. From a management and CISO perspective, they have insight into where sensitive data is stored and whether we are required by law to delete it after a certain period. That's an invaluable overview of the situation, so our users are more aware, and Purview took our information governance to the next level. It also supports our certifications because it helps us comply with regulations, including ISO/IEC 27001, which are essential to our functioning.

The solution increased visibility into our estate; we had a problem with GDPR-related personal information stored in our environment, which we didn't have any insight into. When we used some of Purview's data governance, data lifecycle management, and content search features, we could rapidly go after that information and resolve compliance issues. The tool also provides management with much better oversight of our stored data.  

Purview enables us to show our compliance in real-time and supports it via the compliance manager and compliance score. The assessment templates within the latter allow us to provide an overview of what we have done within the Microsoft 365 and Dynamics environments to our auditors, which is very handy. We're an ISO-certified company, amongst others. In meetings with compliance regulators, we can show that we're using information protection, DLP, data governance, and data lifecycle management functions to comply with regulations fully. The solution dramatically speeds up the process of talking with external auditors. 

Purview saves us time and money. We're an information-intensive organization; seeing where our sensitive information is stored is a significant time-saver. In addition, showing we're safeguarding that data also saves us a great deal of time. From an efficiency standpoint, AI and auto-classification of information is another big time-saver, as the staff members working for our clients don't want to spend time considering how long data needs to be stored, whether it should be archived, how sensitive it is and so on. I can't quantify exactly how much, but all of the above reasons save us a significant amount of time and money.

The data classification part of the solution is excellent, especially as it gives us an insight into our sensitive data within Microsoft 365. 

Data loss prevention is an extremely useful feature. 

The built-in information protection function is another that stands out. 

Purview delivering data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, including AWS and GCP, is becoming increasingly important. It's a relatively new functionality, and I see the importance of it growing even more over the coming years. This kind of functionality is highly appreciated for organizations operating a multi-cloud environment. 

It's very important to us that Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices and data in other SaaS apps. From information protection and data loss prevention perspectives, information is accessed using many different devices, and extending that protection to iOS and Android is a must-have for any platform.   

The product's natively integrated compliance across Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365 is essential. The ability to classify information across workloads, and have a holistic view over our entire data estate where sensitive information is stored and handled, is excellent, especially from a CISO perspective. This is a capability we didn't previously have. Having that overview of where data is stored, plus the multi-platform/multi-cloud approach is the future for data classification and information protection. Wherever our data is stored, we have an overview of which is sensitive and which isn't. 

I greatly appreciate that Purview was built considering critical regulations worldwide, especially the international standards within the compliance manager. There are ISO and NIST standards, ideal for larger countries such as the USA and extensive international organizations.  

We use Purview for data loss prevention (DLP), and we're confident that we can detect and remediate policy violations. Microsoft improved its solution with recent additions, including advanced conditions, and the product is coming of age. The DLP is reaching a maturity level where we can confidently compare it with competitors like Symantec. It goes beyond DLP on emails, documents, on-premise, and endpoints; governmental organizations especially need to detect if sensitive information is being handled on devices. In this respect, Purview offers comprehensive protection.  

Used correctly, Purview is essential in staying on top of compliance. One of the best features in this regard is the solution's compliance manager, which helps us effectively comply with all the regulations. Many organizations should start using the platform because it will keep them on top of their compliance stances, and Microsoft periodically updates the assessments. We must be aware of updates and changes, as we can miss them if we do not pay attention. We can't just run the solution, walk away, and think we're compliant; it requires some monitoring of the developments from a roadmap perspective.   

Microsoft is doing an excellent job improving the platform, and they have a lot coming out shortly. However, the licensing around compliance could be much more transparent; it isn't clear for many organizations what kind of license they need to use, whether that's E5, E5 compliance, an information protection license, user-based, or platform-based. More information here would be a welcome improvement.

Blueprints and landing zones like we have in Azure would be great to see in Purview. The solution could offer a baseline or blueprint of recommended settings for compliance regulations such as GDPR and ISO, which could be applied with a simple switch in the options. 

Some dashboard centralization, like one overview dashboard instead of many loosely connected ones, could be a good improvement.

We must build our own assessments to comply with Dutch regulations, a mix of international and EU standards, as they aren't native to the solution. Many of our clients in the Netherlands require adherence to Dutch regulations, and as well as Purview covers the international aspect, the Dutch side is covered less than we would like.

There's room for improvement regarding Purview's data loss prevention for educating users on how best to handle sensitive data. Microsoft is working on improving the policy tips. Still, from a user's perspective, I want to see more information in the case of a policy violation, such as context or details on why a specific rule is triggered. There are ways to tweak the DLP options, but a significant improvement would be real-time notifications when working on an email or message within Teams, for example. DLP is only triggered when sending or saving, so real-time notifications would be great. The basic functionality is there, but there's room for improvement. 

We've been using Purview for around a year since Microsoft changed the name, but we've used the functionality within Purview for five to ten years.

We haven't had much experience with customer support as we didn't encounter many problems. However, the response is usually rapid, and the expertise depends on the technical knowledge of the agent we speak to.

Neutral

We didn't use different solutions, but some of our clients did and still do, mostly DLP and data classification platforms. The trend is that more have been moving to Purview because many are already paying for it within their licenses and not using it. We're an IT company focusing on Microsoft technology, so we went straight for Purview.

My colleague carried out the initial setup, and I'm primarily involved in deploying the solution's functions to our clients. Setup requires some planning, a discussion with the stakeholders, and a good sense of the data, but it's mostly very straightforward from an admin's perspective.

Our use case is mainly to do with GDPR-related data, and being able to get an overview of that information and act on it led to a speedy return on investment for us. Other organizations in the Netherlands bound by specific government regulations will also see a quick return on their investment when they discover they can classify their information and comply with regulations.

Aside from the complexity of the pricing model, the price itself is realistic. Features like AI components and automatic classification require additional licenses. Still, anyone can start using Purview with a basic E3 license if they're using Microsoft 365 and grow with additional licenses as needed. Overall, we're satisfied with the price.

With the way information is being used and the growth of data, the need for additional licenses for auto-classification etc., will become more and more apparent. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft incorporated those into the basic license in the future.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Regarding Purview's data connector platform for supporting ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources, I have yet to work with it much. In highly regulated environments such as government organizations, it's very relevant, but I have yet to see it used much. The main reason is that the data connector platform is a relatively unknown component within the solution. It has its merits, but the use cases are limited.

If this were a year ago, I would have said the solution is getting there but hasn't reached maturity. However, Purview is now a very comprehensive solution; with all the enhancements, it's one of the best products available.

As Purview reached a maturity level where it could compete with third-party DLP solutions, some of our clients were able to move away from specific endpoint DLP products like Symantec DLP. Going with Purview also allowed these clients to fully leverage their existing licenses within Microsoft 365 and simplify their data governance. It provides a holistic view of the data estate, enables Defender for Cloud in Azure, and offers an integrated overview in one pane of glass.

Regarding automation, we use some limited functions using the solution's trainable classifiers and auto-classification of information. This notifies the user when working with certain kinds of sensitive data, GDPR and otherwise, so we use some basic AI functions within the platform.  

We're not currently using the product for insider risk management. Still, we are in the process of looking into implementing those features and how we could leverage them within our environment.

We utilize Microsoft Purview to manage our data classifications, identify sensitive information in our documents for certification protection and data loss prevention, and we anticipate employing insider risk management. While we haven't yet implemented insider risk management, it is part of our strategic plan and compliance assessment.

From an access management standpoint, we have users accessing our data from various mobile devices, including Android, iOS, and iPad, as well as Windows and MacBook computers. Therefore, it is crucial to implement consistent policies and safeguards across all platforms, regardless of the operating system or device type.

We are a heavily Microsoft shop so all Microsoft platforms are important to us and Purview's natively integrated compliance is great.

It is important and useful for us that Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world.

We report on all of our DLP policy violations. We have alerts set up to notify our security team to take action when violations occur.

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention is an effective tool for educating users on how to best handle sensitive data. It can detect and identify various types of sensitive data, although we have observed that not all of the built-in detection mechanisms function flawlessly. Consequently, we have had to modify some of the detection modules. Additionally, certain detection rules specific to New Zealand have not performed as expected. Despite these limitations, the ability to detect sensitive data and utilize prompts to guide users in correctly classifying documents is quite valuable. We intend to expand our use of these features as we progressively deploy Purview across our organization.

We have several Mac OS users in our business, so it is important that Purview can and does extend policies regardless of the platform being used.

Since implementing Purview, the compliance assessment process has been effective. The expansion of country-specific regulations has been a crucial development. In New Zealand, we've utilized built-in privacy act laws and regulations, which have been beneficial. However, I believe the integration of the Copilot tool and advancements in AI will likely bring about continuous changes to the compliance landscape.

With Purview, we can continue using native Microsoft products for scalability, eliminating the need to rely on external vendors. This approach reduces the number of vendors in our environment.

The visibility Purview provides into our estate is useful. We have had a privacy campaign running for the last year and using Purview to essentially see where our data and sensor data are.

Purview enables us to show our compliance in real-time. We would use it to help demonstrate our compliance to regulators.

Purview enables us to save approximately 30 percent of our security team's time by providing visibility into previously obscured areas of our environment. Moreover, Purview is seamlessly integrated into our existing Microsoft licenses, eliminating any additional costs.

Purview helps us stay on top of compliance.

Data authentication enables us to classify documents based on whether they should be restricted for internal consumption or permitted for external sharing. This classification allows us to apply appropriate policies to each document type.

The DLP is also a valuable feature that we use.

The reporting is limited and has room for improvement.

Privacy features should be integrated into the core product rather than offered as optional add-ons, as privacy is not a luxury but a fundamental requirement.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for six months.

I would rate the stability of Purview a nine out of ten.

Purview can meet our scalability needs.

The technical support used to be more reliable and consistently good. Now, while it's still possible to get assistance from a knowledgeable representative, the overall quality of support has declined.

Neutral

We previously used Azure Information Protection and Symantec DLP. We switched to Microsoft Purview because of the cost savings.

Initial deployment is straightforward as we are a Microsoft shop, facilitating seamless integration with the native platform.

The deployment of Purview involved three individuals: one primary engineer and one architect. The initial deployment phase spanned six weeks, followed by an ongoing tuning process to maintain Purview's up-to-date status.

We have seen a return on investment, but it is too early to quantify the exact savings.

Purview is included in our Microsoft E5 licensing. There is no additional cost, but it does require us to maintain an E5 license to continue using Purview.

To fully justify the cost of Purview, it is important to leverage all of its capabilities.

I would rate Microsoft Purview a seven out of ten. While Purview is gradually improving, its reporting capabilities remain subpar. As we introduce additional products like Copilot and others, there will likely be a need for more robust integration plans that outline how these products will interact and the benefits they will provide.

We only use Microsoft Purview in our Microsoft 365 workload environment.

We are currently evaluating AI products like Copilot and several chatGPT-style tools for potential implementation within our organization. However, we are proceeding cautiously until we have fully implemented Purview to address our concerns regarding potential data loss associated with AI product usage. Once we are satisfied with Purview's effectiveness in mitigating these risks, we will accelerate our evaluation and adoption of AI products.

We have 5,000 users who were using Purview for the software, and we have a two-person support team. Every corporate user in our organization has a license to use the solution.

Purview requires regular maintenance because there is an ongoing need to review components like DLP rules and data classification. This ongoing maintenance ensures that the system continues to function effectively and accurately. Additionally, ongoing tuning helps to minimize false positives and false negatives, ensuring that the system accurately detects potential issues.

Ensure clear communication regarding the desired grouping of data classifications and the functioning of the data loss prevention policy. Understanding these aspects is crucial for effective product utilization. User training and communication are essential around the implementation of the data loss prevention policy as it impacts user behavior. Senior leadership should take the lead in championing this initiative, possibly as part of a broader privacy or border protection campaign. Our involvement in this process can be minimal.

We are integrating Purview with Copilot. We are creating prompts in Copilot for whatever we require from Purview. There are multiple scenarios where we create something in Purview: eDiscovery, auditing, labels, and data loss protection alerts. It is something like the parent application for the data loss alerts.

The major benefit is the workflow inside Purview. While creating policies, we can add an organization's security groups and, for those particular users, we can control the user data or exfiltration. We can control the workflow of those users. If we want to exclude a particular channel that they use to communicate about sensitive data, we don't need to monitor it. We can just exclude it. That means we can include or exclude every individual step in their workflow. Based on our customers' requirements, because there are a lot of features in Purview, we can easily include, exclude, enable, or disable things. That is the major advantage of Purview.

Also, it has reduced false-positive alerts for data loss protection. Why? Because the policies or detection patterns are based on the normal or generic concepts that apply within each organization. Each will have its own set of policies. And that generates fewer alerts. An organization can have particular data monitored, and that can be changed from organization to organization. As a result, there is a lower chance of false-positive scenarios.

My favorite features are eDiscovery and insider risk management, because these are the major threats to an organization that can't be easily traced.

Also, there are multiple rules within Purview related to cloud applications. Purview's major focus is on Microsoft Azure and its Microsoft cloud-related applications, such as Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, et cetera. They have created a set of rules and added workflows to the policies as well. That means we can directly add those particular cloud workflows to the policies. Alerts can be triggered and workflows implemented based on the rules that we set while creating a policy inside Purview.

We also use Copilot, the next generation of ChatGPT. If you ask it: "According to Purview, what were the DLP alerts that were generating today?" it will take just five seconds to generate the data—whatever is available in the backend of Purview. Copilot is integrated with Purview. If a person is using Purview but doesn't have any idea how to operate it—meaning they don't know how to search for alerts—they can easily ask Copilot. They can create a prompt. That way, a non-technical person can get the data.

Also, all the required security products are integrated with Purview, including endpoint DLP.

I would like to see them simplify advanced hunting. There are differences when looking at an incident in the M365 portal versus Purview, and the main one is the advanced hunting. In the M365 portal, you can write KQL queries and fetch data. If that was available in Purview, it would be very good.

Another issue is that for incidents, only DLP alerts are available in Purview, not the incidents themselves. An incident consists of multiple categories of alerts belonging to multiple products. But in Purview, we can only see DLP alerts, yet those alerts could be part of an incident in the incident portal. We are not able to see if a particular alert ID is part of a given incident.

For example, if an exfiltration happens, the exfiltration-related alert will only be triggered inside of Purview. But it's possible that before the exfiltration, there was a kill chain there, such as initial access, privilege escalation, a user being compromised, or a brute-force attack. Those types of alerts are not available inside Purview. They are covered in other Microsoft products. All those products' alerts will combine into one case and generate an incident as a single story. But in Purview, the incident is not available.

I have been using Microsoft Purview since it was introduced. I am part of our Purview team.

With Purview itself, I have not faced any issues, but there have been some with Copilot.

The scalability of Purview is eight to nine out of 10.

The price is a little bit high, but it's worth the money because it has a lot of features. And there will be more features in the future.

My advice is that you need to understand the architecture of Purview first. Play with it and go through the data loss policies. Whoever is using Purview should have some idea about data loss protection policies. If you have these things, you can easily do things in Purview, such as labeling and IRM.

There is no maintenance. As a user, you just see the alerts, while the protection is taken care of by the Microsoft team.

To ensure compliance with numerous regulations for our data governance initiative, we employ Microsoft Purview for data classification.

In our specific case, we only have on-premises servers and the same Microsoft cloud platform, Azure. I have not used Microsoft Purview with any other cloud providers like AWS or anything like that. However, it appears that Purview can be used to protect data across multiple clouds and platforms.

In the future, it could be important for us that Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices. We will be onboarding data that requires updating some of the tables, descriptions, and other aspects. In that case, it would be beneficial for users to be able to access it from different devices. However, in my case and for the people in IT, we will always be using computers.

Microsoft Purview's native integration with Azure Dynamics and Office compliance is good. We have utilized it with Synapse Analytics and Data Factory, both Microsoft products. The integration is seamless and efficient. However, in the context of Synapse Analytics, its value proposition is less evident. While it is a nice feature, I cannot fully grasp its significance.

It is crucial that Purview was built with consideration for critical regulations from around the world. This is an integral part of the classification rules and it simplifies our work. However, I haven't seen specific references to regulations such as GDPR or PII. There are numerous laws in different states, as well as preferences here in Canada, but I haven't come across specific examples. Nevertheless, the classifications encompass a wide range of government information, sensitive data like financial information, and personal information based on various formats that we can even adjust or create our own. So, it's a positive aspect.

Purview has assisted us in creating an updated catalog that is more realistic. It has also enabled us to quickly classify our data. Additionally, we aim to enrich the data catalog with more metadata, both now and in the future. While this process is primarily manual, we are exploring ways to involve business users to streamline it.

It has improved the visibility into our estate.

Purview allows us to demonstrate our compliance on a near real-time basis. While executing a single scan will provide updated information, it doesn't provide true real-time visibility. To achieve the closest to real-time compliance monitoring, we can execute data extraction processes every four hours.

We have saved around 40 hours per month on some of our projects, which also leads to cost savings.

The ability to classify data quickly and effortlessly is arguably Microsoft Purview's most valuable feature. It can scan all tables and columns, identifying those that contain personal names, date builds, or other sensitive information.

I am interested in exploring the process of data scanning to identify data lines that do not contain stored procedures. This would allow us to detect potential black boxes within our data, where we are unable to trace the flow of information and identify all instances of stored procedures. Additionally, we would like to expand the reporting capabilities beyond Power BI to encompass other visualization tools such as Tableau, Looker, and others.

Reflecting organizational changes within Purview is impractical. Any such changes necessitate discarding existing data and starting anew, which increases both the cost and time required for maintenance. Therefore, I believe that enhancing Purview's maintainability is crucial.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for one year.

I would rate the stability of Purview a nine out of ten.

Purview is easily scalable in the cloud.

The technical support team was readily available for a Zoom call and was able to view my screen and provide assistance. The only downside was that I ultimately resolved the issue myself, which suggests that the local Microsoft support may not be as knowledgeable.

Positive

I have used other solutions other than Purview but it doesn't encompass the entire data management lifecycle. For example, Tableau has a data management suite, but it's primarily focused on analyzing reports, enforcing visualization governance, and managing data within Tableau itself. It doesn't extend to data sources or beyond that. Other data management tools in development offer similar functionality, but they may not have specific classifications for personal information.

The initial deployment was straightforward. The cloud administrator handled the subscription and all the necessary paperwork, while I proceeded with the setup.

The price is reasonable considering its value.

I would rate Microsoft Purview nine out of ten. Purview is a good product but still has some areas to improve.

Thus far, we haven't had any comprehensive maintenance for Purview. While there is maintenance required for scanning new servers, that's essentially the extent of our maintenance efforts. We may need to make significant changes to Purview's structure to enhance its usability. Purview's current structure resembles that of an organizational department. For instance, if a marketing application is mistakenly scanned under HR, I cannot simply move it to the correct location. Instead, I must discard all existing data and start from scratch.