Microsoft Purview Data Governance Reviews

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.

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 need to catalog and assign terminology to all of our data to find all the personal information that we have within our copy systems.

Over the last three years or so, we have been using Kafka and nesting queues a lot. We wanted to bring in an orchestration engine to integrate seamlessly with our nesting system. We had a lot of legacy applications that are not that old, and we did not want to rewrite software components that we own to get the benefits of orchestration. That's where there is a need. One of the factors that will decide if the use of Camunda will spread out to more use cases in our company is the ease of integration.

We weren't sure what our data was in certain areas. We created red Xs that basically indicated the kinds of codes and criteria we are looking for. Purview uses them to scan, and then it tells us what it has found and where that data may lie within our servers and databases. Now, people in our company have a good understanding, when they look at a database, of what data is in that database.

It has dramatically improved the visibility we have into our environment. That's the main concept of Purview, to show you what data you have. The solution has been magnificent due to the fact that now we know, when we scan the data set, what we have within the database.

One of the compliance criteria in the UK is to make sure you know where all your personal information is, and Purview gives us the ability to know that across our data estate. When we have meetings with compliance regulators it's great because we can demonstrate where our data is. There are no awkward questions because we can say, "This is where our data is." We know it's accurate and it's one version of the truth. Everyone understands that, which is fantastic.

As a result, it has definitely saved us time because when we have requirements meetings they try to establish where the data is. But with the cataloging ability of the tool, we know where all the data is. We don't need to spend five hours finding out where all the data is because we already know. We've already got a scan and it's already told us, and we have verified that. Now we can use that as a blueprint to go forward.

Purview gives us the ability to find out what data we hold, and in which tables, so we can understand and have one version of the truth in every database server system.

The cataloging tool is definitely the most valuable. To catalog data you can have Purview do a scan that you configure yourself. It goes through all of your data in the database server you're connected to and will say there is "date of birth" in this column and personal information in that column, and names in this other column. It tells you about all the data you have in your tables, which helps people understand our data. We now know what data we have.

It's also very important that the solution provides data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments. Purview has links to all of our data so that we can make sure we have the right data protection involved.

Also, because it's very important to make sure that we have everything in place, and we only deal with companies that have all their compliance and rules in place, the fact Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world is essential for our company, when it comes to scanning data.

Purview's data connector platform for non-Microsoft data sources is good, but there is some functionality that hasn't been developed yet. There are some servers that it can't connect to yet, because they're still in a trial process. However, there are obviously some non-MS sources it can support, which is good. Hopefully, for the ones it can't connect to, that will be rolled out soon.

There are other things that need to be developed in Purview. The data retention isn't great at the moment, and in that area we need certain functionality to be built. However, it's a very good tool and one I would champion.

I've been using Microsoft Purview for the last two years.

It hasn't gone wrong yet, so I can only give the stability a 10 out of 10. There have been no issues so far.

There should be no issue rolling it out, going forward. It's already working on seven or eight systems at the moment. However, we expect it will be on a lot more.

We have had a lot of contact with their technical support. Because we're at a very early stage with Purview, we need to make sure that we understand the functionality. They've been fantastic, mainly their support in America. They've been great. There have been no issues and it's very straightforward to understand what they're saying.

Positive

We previously used IBM InfoSphere. That tool wasn't good enough for what we needed.

The setup was pretty straightforward. We worked with our data engineer and it was sorted straight away. It was deployed very easily, in part because it's cloud-based. We had two or three people involved who work in data engineering, architecture, and data governance.

It's deployed across cloud and on-prem solutions. The maintenance is not heavy. It's very straightforward.

It was all done in-house.

We have seen ROI massively. We now know where all our data is, so we don't need to worry about that. The amount of time that it would have taken to do that manually, without a tool like this, would have been huge. It was done automatically with the scan.

The pricing is absolutely excellent, fantastic. And the licensing is also fantastic. You pay for what you use, and the license isn't massive, unlike a lot of other licenses.

We used the review sites to look at all the other technology, and it came up that Purview was the most cost-effective tool to do what we wanted. It wasn't just the cost, but rather, the cost and the functionality. What we wanted was the right price. We found that other tools could do very similar things for a lot more money. While the cost of Purview is very good, the functionality is also very good.

Make sure you have all the details of your endpoints in place because Purview needs to link to the endpoints. If you haven't got the endpoints in place, then you can't make the connection to the servers and to the databases. But if you have all those details in hand, it's very simple and straightforward.

Regardless of our use case, it's important that Purview helps protect iOS, Mac, Android, and data in other SaaS apps. But we use it to catalog our on-prem and our cloud so for us, it's not necessary that it covers iPhone or iOS or Mac. It's more of a system-architecture scanner.

And because it's a cataloging tool for us, we still need our existing systems in place. Purview is like a layer on top of that to find out where we have things and where we need things.

It's a cloud-based system, but it doesn't have any relation to Office or other Microsoft systems. It can link up to anything.

The only reason I'm not going to give it a 10 overall is that not all the functionality has been rolled out yet. Purview is very early on as a tool.

Overall, Purview is a fantastic tool for staying on top of compliance, knowing where your data is and what data you hold. In terms of data retention, you know what data is where and how long it's been there for. It really helps the business to understand that.

I have mostly used Purview for the Content search. For example, if our CEO wants to look into whether a certain type of conversation is taking place in all of the data, we use the Content search. 

The second most common scenario for which I use Purview is endpoint DLP, where we have blocked USBs and different browsers and implemented other endpoint policies.

There is also a new feature that we are trying to use, the Privacy Risk Management, where we are trying to upload the fingerprint data of our users to use it on our endpoint devices. We are replacing Windows 11 for Business.

Purview is becoming the new one-stop solution. It gives you a clearer, better perspective and view of your data all across your Microsoft suite.

In addition, it absolutely saves money. It brings a lot of efficiency when it comes to extracting and exporting data that is required by upper management.

The most valuable feature is the information protection because Windows Information Protection was discontinued from the M365 suite, which was Intune. It was very much in demand. Then Purview came in; it was Compliance Manager, and they changed the name to Purview. The information protection they inaugurated in Purview is the most demanded and the most useful in Purview.

Purview gives you a different perspective on exactly what is running in your organization. It's just very vast. I can't summarize it into one or two points. It starts off with records management, insider risk management, and information protection. And there is the discovery of the clouds, and we can get analytics on that as well, so that we know which user is using which cloud application and for how much time. The Activity explorer tells us which user was transferring out what data at what moment and on which device, including the serial number.

It was made for data protection in multi-cloud environments, but not just multi-cloud; it was made for on-prem as well. If our devices are hybrid, we can absolutely use Purview's data protection. Because it's a very new tool, people don't know exactly how important it is. It covers all my tenants in all my Microsoft applications, and I can get analytics through a couple of toggle buttons. 

The classifiers they have brought in are also important for any organization because, in the Content search, they have default classifiers that can actually detect when a user has been harassed or when a user has shared his personal banking details. That is important when it comes to compliance.

It's a lovely tool for supporting ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources. I worked with corporate devices in my previous project, wherein we were trying to connect the WhatsApp database with our Purview to have a better hold on the corporate devices and know what conversations were taking place. When talking about connectors, Purview is leveling up. It was just remarkable when I realized that we could actually set up a connector with WhatsApp for our Purview and have analytics from the database of our tenant.

It is a remarkable pivot that Microsoft has made in data analytics, data accumulation, and playing around with every single word that has been exchanged within the tenant or organization. It will do remarkably well in the future. We all know that there are a couple of other remarkable applications that Microsoft got, but it took 20 years. One example is Intune. Although Purivew is fairly new on the market, I'm pretty sure there will soon be more and more people trained on it, getting certified, and trying to implement the features for daily use in their organizations.

The best part about remediating the data on an organization's tenant is the recording audit they have started. It's a new feature that offers an auto-auditing mode in the Activity explorer, which constantly monitors all of the data. And, of course, according to the rules, it will drop notifications by email to the global admins.

And Compliance Manager is part of the solution, and you always get to see your real-time compliance score.

It would help if we could have a view of the devices we know to be potential weak points in an organization—those couple of devices that are very prone to external attacks. If we could have a view something like we have in CrowdStrike—which is, I believe, the biggest competitor to Microsoft when it comes to security—a node nodal view, which we also have in Defender, that would make it a more complete, one-stop solution. That would save a lot of time for the admins and the engineers.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for the past eight months.

I haven't had a chance to open up a ticket with Purview technical support yet.

When you talk about how important data loss prevention is in an organization, you can tell from its name, "data loss prevention". An organization should be ready for any notorious activities. That is where DLP comes in. We can set alerts and have custom policies. And we have the endpoint DLP settings as well. It is very similar to Windows Information Protection, which we used to use in past through Intune. But there is this new place from which we can set up the endpoint DLP and make sure that the probability of losing data is minimal.

As for using Purview for educating users on how to handle sensitive data, the recommendations are always Microsoft-specific, never engineer-specific. Microsoft has four templates for basic security, and it says that your security score will be 99 by using them. But it gets a little bit difficult for an end-user to work with them. It depends on the organization. We can sell the Activity explorer to a client so that we have constant monitoring of every single file that is changed, modified, archived, or shuffled from the cloud to a local device, if that is allowed in the organization. It provides a view of what the organization's data is doing, and we can give that to top management to provide them with more and more clarity.

It's too soon for me to say whether using Purview will reduce the number of solutions we have that interact with each other. If I have to do a message trace, I can go through a Content search on Exchange Online as well. If we're talking about the Activity explorer and giving visual context to where data is going and how it has been used, again, I can find that on the Defender portal. Based on my experience with Purview, it is more of a redundancy. Microsoft loves doing that, having the same features in different places. It's still a fabulous tool, but I have noticed a redundancy of features in other admin centers.

Purview has definitely helped to reduce the time to action on insider threats, but in comparison to Defender, it still needs a little bit of work. The features are on the redundant side. The admins do get notified in real time via email. It's similar to Defender, and I am looking forward to seeing what different aspects Purview will bring on when it comes to insider threats.

It has its pros and cons because it's fairly new. You have to understand what an organization is asking for, but once it is set up and it goes into its semi-automated mode, it is a time-saving machine.

Most use cases are for DLP, data loss prevention, policies, and archiving, as well as creating retention policies and audit logs. 

If you want to do e-discovery searches, like tenant-to-tenant migration, or saving mailboxes to import into other mailboxes, you can use Purview for this as well.

Customers have seen a lot of benefits. It's reduced risk. Customers can monitor data and track discriminatory words. There are templates that you can use to send information about a breach of terms of service. They can do so much with a single product.

The most valuable features vary from organization to organization.

The e-discovery search is useful. It gives good insights into mailboxes. You can even discover emails you can't see, such as those that have been deleted. It's helpful for discovering any email at all. 

The deep search, the ability to search for content no matter where it is located, is quite helpful as well.

It helps with compliance.

The solution can be used in multiple cloud environments. Some organizations are not just Microsoft-driven. It is able to integrate well with other applications. They can't be just limited to a Microsoft environment.

It can provide access to iOS, Microsoft, Android, SaaS, and other apps. They might manage it via Microsoft InTune. However, they can monitor or track information across a variety of platforms. 

The ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources is good. There are data connectors from the admin center to help you get information from non-Mircosoft data centers. That's handy for those not heavy on Microsoft.

It integrates well with Office and Microsoft Dynamics. We can use Exchange and One Drive. We can monitor data everywhere online. We can do everything from the Azure portal. It's easy to set up and configure everything from the Azure portal. You can also select or remove certain applications. For example, depending on your use case, if you want, you can, for example, turn off SharePoint. You can also set up and monitor for abusive words or discriminatory language as well.

The solution was built to take into account critical regulations from around the world. For credit card protection, for example, they have different templates that handle different regulation requirements, and you can work towards creating your own custom templates if none of them suit your criteria.

It's great for remediating policy violations. It can detect them, and the AI can scan documents and patterns, including keywords, and it can detect specific information as required. Whatever the users are trying to achieve, it can assist. 

It's not difficult to educate users to protect data. There are links that describe what you can do and how best to use it. 

We like that the solution has extended into Mac OS endpoints. It has fewer limitations now. It's a game-changer. In a single glance of the dashboard, we can see a single platform and view of every endpoint, no matter the OS. We don't have to use multiple vendors. It's much easier to have one product that can solve multiple issues on multiple platforms. It's helped us reduce the number of solutions and simplified the complexity of data governance. When you reduce to a single product, it becomes far less complex. 

The visibility is great. Most customers challenge me to learn more about the product as they are very interested in what products like Purview can do. Those in the control department have been giving good feedback. 

The real-time compliance is very good. 

It helps reduce insider threats. Customers have found it really helps to do that. They can track and manage the uploading of one drive and the movement to another. 

The insights clients have from a single dashboard - being able to monitor and track everything and even improve their security posture, are really helping clients a lot. 

I'm not sure if there are any missing features. 

What I would like to see improved is the documentation scanning and printing.

The partial scripting could be improved with a better GUI.

It could reduce pricing to encourage usage. 

I've been using the solution for up to seven years. I worked as a Microsoft engineer and have helped troubleshoot issues across many Microsoft solutions, of which Purview is one of them.

The solution is stable and working fine.

It is a scalable solution. Microsoft has a knack for allowing its products to integrate with a lot of solutions. 

Typically, I troubleshoot myself for clients. 

I did not previously use a different solution.

I wasn't involved in the setup process. However, I have deployed it myself in my lab. Usually, I don't implement unless it's a new customer who is setting Microsoft up from scratch. 

There isn't much maintenance don't eh cloud-side, unless there are organizational or policy changes. You can test it out first before implementing anything organization-wide. 

I can't speak to the exact pricing. For my clients, it depends on the organization. Most find the cost to be high. Smaller companies may find it expensive, however, enterprises have no problem with it. 

I don't work too closely with the AI aspect of the solution. 

I'd advise others to use the solution. It increases the security posture of your organization. Security is not something that is absolute. No matter how sophisticated your software is, you need control, and Purview is the right way to go.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

We have got all kinds of things to include in it. Specifically, we are looking at the data classification piece and the data protection piece that goes into it. Those are the two immediate cases. We have got ECIF partners helping us with it, and Microsoft is heavily involved. These are the two initial ones, but as we continue to expand, we are going to bring more functionality under the purview of Purview. Those are the broader use cases right now, but the idea behind it is to simplify the landscape. 

The reason why we made the decision to go with E5 and Purview is that Microsoft's technology stack has now caught up with the rest of the industry. Our preference is to keep it all in one technology stack so that it makes things simpler to connect and maintain. Previously, we had a collection of a few different applications. We want to offset that purely from the complexity, cost, and technical debt standpoint, and we are invested with Microsoft. We like their technologies, and that is why we found the match. We ran the assessments, and there are still some things that are not quite there. We are hoping by the time our program gets to implement them, they are going to be ready. They are going to fulfill our requirements.

Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, including AWS and GCP, which is extremely important. We are primarily a Microsoft Azure house. We have taken that leap with them. We are a strategic framework partner, and we are proud of it. We are proud of the relationship, and we are growing within that framework. The footprint eventually has to mature to a multi-cloud capability. Anything that we do in the multi-cloud framework, if it cannot be addressed with the existing data protection toolset, it would be, at a minimum, frustrating. In the worst case, it would be a significant rebuild of our landscape. We would be taking a step back in time because of the fragmentation that we are doing today.

It is extremely important that Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world. There are different PII regulations, and there are specific regulations that are applicable to the utility business. Different countries have different data residency requirements. Can Purview help with that? That is a little bit of a long shot when it comes to expectations, but all of those pieces would help us because otherwise, we would have to build it from the ground. That was an expectation that I shared with the Microsoft team, and they brought specialists to the table, but from an automation standpoint, we are still pretty far away from that preferred goal.

We use Purview for data loss protection, but it is too early to assess Purview data loss protection for remediating policy violations. We are very hopeful about how we are going to set this up because it all depends on how you set up the policies. There is a lot of learning. We are going to set up the initial typesets, and then we are going to build on them as we go along, but I believe that everything that we need is there.

Purview has not affected the visibility we have into our estate because we have not quite reached that design aspect. We have not gone to that level of detail because we are still tinkering with a few other third-party products for visibility across our estate. It is an insightful question, but we have not quite thought it through.

Purview has not yet saved us money and time. It has cost us money to subscribe, so it has not saved us. There is a business case behind it where we do believe there is an offset of the third-party products, but the execution is going to determine how much of that projection we can actually meet. That is one piece of it. From a time standpoint, it is a productivity play. As we get more conversant with the platform or as our folks get more conversant with the platform, I believe this is going to become a lot easier for us to work with than some of our other products. Time will tell, but I believe this can get us there. Currently, we are in that early phase of understanding it, getting the structure built around it, and scaling our skillsets up, and then we can start talking about how we squeeze this and get better from productivity and other standpoints.

Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices, and data in other SaaS apps. Its connectivity to Android devices is not so important to us, but with all other devices, it is important. One of our biggest problems with Microsoft solutions is their closed-ended ecosystem approach not just with InfoSec solutions but also with some of the connectivity capabilities. It is very inspiring to hear them talk about fabric across the ecosystem boundaries. We hope to see more and more of that because if we are going to include what we have from Microsoft as our primary solution, it should replace the capabilities that are brought by other ecosystem-agnostic solutions.

It is pretty early, but the decision to go with this investment was largely driven by the simplification of our information security technology management stack. That is the primary objective. Once you simplify and you have a connected structure, it allows for faster adoption there. It also gives us additional capabilities as we go on using the technology that we are familiar with, and we do not have to depend on outside parties to come in and tell us how to do certain things. Obviously, as new features are rolled out, it is good to know and hear from Microsoft. In some cases, they are very helpful in getting them implemented. 

We have had a lot of issues since we moved to Unified Support. There have been work gaps there, and we believe they fixed them, but we need to make sure that they are going to be sustainable. It is to be seen.

In terms of features, our technical team would be able to speak about the areas of improvement better. In terms of additional features, that would again require a conversation with the technical team as we are thinking about what pieces and parts are missing. We have a feature set that we have shared with Microsoft, and that gets into a lot of detail. We did the analysis. We believe that we are on the road map for some of those feature sets.

Purview is a relatively newer offering. We upgraded to E5, and we are just starting to do the implementation. It has been about four months.

Stability-wise, it is there. The product is enterprise-grade, so definitely, there are no doubts in our mind about that. Its functionality and capability will keep improving as we go along. We are confident in the stability aspect.

Scalability should be fine. At least for our footprint, it should be fine. We are a 7,000-employee company, so it is not a huge footprint. If we are talking about mega giants, such as Saudi Aramco, or Procter and Gamble, that would be a different question.

We have had a lot of issues since we moved to Unified Support. It has largely been because of the amount of traffic that they have under Unified Support, and it almost feels like their back office is not necessarily trained very well to handle those kinds of calls. Instead of a high-tech solution offering, it is just something that people in the back office can hand off from one shift to another, so their transition points are not correct.

It is hard to find the right people at Microsoft to support the technologies that we have from them, but the account team has made a lot of effort. They have put a lot of effort and brought it to their attention. Kudos to them for trying to fix the problem, but it is still early to say if we are on what we call emergency support, or if this is a level of sustainable performance that they can bring, which is going to keep us happy. 

We were using other options. We had technology gaps. We had a fragmentation of visibility and things, but we were not able to get a full estate view of it. Those were all supposed to solve cancer and world hunger, but they did not, so we did not go into Purview with that mindset. However, what we are hoping for is that there would be incremental improvements that would get us enough visibility of real estate and help us solve the problems of the past.

I was not involved in its deployment. Our technical team handles that.

It is too early for that, but we are hopeful. We hope to see a landing point by the end of this year, and then start to ramp up on the value prop by the middle of next year.

The interesting part is how they are bundling the version into the E5 stack. If it was not for that inclusion, this would have been a difficult conversation for us, so kudos to Microsoft on that. Separating it out may become a problem for customer retention. It is definitely a good move on Microsoft's part to include it as part of any existing or any system upgrades for customers that were on E3. Is the cost good or bad? Any cost that is incurred is really about the value. Do we want to put a price on a breach? I hope not. That is where the cost comes in. The value comes in right there.

You get what you pay for most of the time, and that is just the reality in life. You can go out and buy six cheap items that do not work well together or you can invest with Microsoft in their stack, which allows us to keep everything working, as we would expect it to work, seamlessly and with as little ongoing investment. We have a very large partnership with Microsoft, and so from a cost standpoint, we are paying for it. We never like to pay for things, but we have to. We believe we are in a pretty fair spot with Microsoft on that.

The evaluation landed on the maturity scale that Microsoft had shown. We went through almost a year-long evaluation with them of our landscape, and during that stage, they went from multiple small snippets of PoCs, etcetera, to win the business and convince us more to say, "This is why we need to move there." It was a competitive analysis, but it was more time-based and maturity-based rather than Microsoft versus the rest of the world. Our intent was to move to Microsoft, but the question for us was—Was Microsoft ready?

To those evaluating this solution, I would advise making sure you go through a proper set of PoCs and give it adequate time. We gave it almost a year, and we still felt it was not enough time. Have a very clear definition of what your requirements, use cases, and expectations are, and truthfully check the boxes for yourself. It is not a comparison between Microsoft and other products. They all do the same thing differently. It is really a bottom-line comparison of whether it gets the job done and what is more important for you. Is the technology stack consolidation important, or having the best of the best for each of those capabilities is important? That is a differentiator for most companies. They have to get real clear in their heads.

I have not heard too many complaints. Given where we are, conservatively, I would rate Microsoft Purview a good solid six out of ten. It is not negative feedback, but it is just too early to say that it is going to check all the boxes for us. However, our initial impressions are great. As with every implementation, once the initial phase is over, we get into some of the details. We find gaps and some very positive things, but at the same time, we do not want to say it is going to work. There is a lot of learning that has to happen. How many gaps are going to remain still needs to be seen once we address the implementation across our landscape.

We are using Microsoft Purview for Azure Information Protection and DLP to create automatic labeling and policies for sensitive labels. We are also using Insider Risk Management, Communication Compliance, and Records Management for our client.

Microsoft Purview provides data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, which is essential. Some of our clients require these measures because their systems must be secure and their data must be protected from loss for auditing purposes. Therefore, the client is requesting that we enable all of these features for the system.

It is important that Microsoft Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world.

The data loss protection helps remediate policy violations.

Data loss protection helps educate users on how to handle sensitive data.

It improved our visibility into our environment.

Microsoft Purview helps us show our compliance in real time.

Microsoft Purview helps reduce our time to action against threats. It takes some time for the initial configuration, but it detects as soon as the configuration is enabled.

Microsoft Purview integrations with non-Microsoft products have room for improvement.

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for four months.

Microsoft Purview is generally stable, but some of our clients occasionally experience accessibility issues when connecting to the cloud.

Microsoft Purview is scalable.

From a technical support standpoint, I have raised many tickets to date. Within this format, I have raised more than fifteen tickets for various purposes. I feel that few technical team members have a good understanding of the problems we are trying to explain. The rest of them waste our time. Typically, they say they will get back to us after two or three days, but then they come back to the same place they left off. Only a few technical team members are knowledgeable about Microsoft Purview. We still have tickets that are open to this date.

Neutral

The price is reasonable because most of our clients already have an E3 license, which makes implementation easy. For other clients who do not have an E3 license, the cost is higher because they must purchase the package.

I would rate Microsoft Purview seven out of ten.

Maintenance is done by the vendor.

I recommend Microsoft Purview for organizations with an existing E3 license, rather than spending money on a third-party DLP.

I was working for a nonprofit here in Kansas called Children International. I was a global data engineering manager, and I was tasked specifically with developing a data governance program. And at the same time, that's right when Purview came out. So I spent a year in that realm. I've been very plugged into Purview ever since.

The main use is data governance. Now, not every firm is necessarily at that maturity level when it comes to understanding data as an asset. So, a lot of companies can use it just as a data dictionary, a business glossary, which is nice, but it doesn't give the entire picture of what Purview can actually do, and so, actually, there were a dozen of implementations of Purview that I have been a part of in the past. I've led as a consultant and an architect. I'd say maybe I have used twenty-five percent of every feature that it has to offer. I am still kind of catching up with the rest of the features.

Microsoft Purview breaks down barriers to sharing information, accessing data, understanding what a piece of data means, how it is defined, how it's interpreted, and then how the end user uses it. So, with Purview, when it's best used, and it is at its best when the end users are the ones that are very involved because they're the ones who are going to be using it. Its users can see the support, and it grows year over year, you know, a kind of revenue measure. I don't know how exactly this is created. Also, I don't know what fields it uses. I don't know exactly what this means. We have a different department in the company that may need this. So they feel the need to go out and then hop to Purview. So it definitely knocks down a lot of barriers. It eliminates a lot of needless communication between different departments, and it just centralizes all information about an organization's data assets.

Speaking of the valuable features, I would speak on behalf of my clients, considering how it seemed when it was implemented. So, the sensitivity labels are big. The insights are also very nice as it gives the visual representation of being able to look at what or how the data storage is performing, especially monitoring if they are tagging technical assets or if they are adding business glossary terms. So, that's big, along with the basic features of Microsoft Purview. I'd say the last one that is very big with most clients is data lineage and being able to integrate that end-to-end flow component kind of so they can see that this is data from a Power BI dataset, and then they can follow where that dataset is coming from like it's from a SQL query in a Power BI report itself and data coming from a SQL Server, etcetera, etcetera.

The out-of-the-box connectors and being able to connect to third-party apps and data storage were some of the areas where they started off strong, but that's something that I think needs to continuously be at the forefront of the developers and the engineers for Purview to make sure that it is constantly up to date and can talk with any data source that it may need within a data state. So I would say that's not necessarily a con, but it's a possible weak point that could be strengthened.

I've been implementing Microsoft Purview with my clients for three and a half years. I'm a consultant for a Microsoft partner.

I think Purview, in terms of its stability, a lot of people think Purview itself is for data governance. Whereas data governance is something that is more like how we now view, let's say, Toyota six sigma or Agile, where it's kind of embedded in an organization and kind of culturally and throughout the work that's being done, it's kind of embedded in the network. I think Purview is kind of the same way. So, data governance operates in the same way. It first needs to be adopted and agreed upon by those that will be using it. Purview is the tool, and that's, like, the actual interface, and that's the actual, you know, that's the tool that allows it to be done. But in terms of stability, I think Purview does as good a job as it can of providing a foundation to make stability with data governance as easy as possible for those that manage it, but it does come down to those that are in charge of Purview itself to make sure that it stays stable. Well, I won't just say stable. I'll say that it is as stable as the data governance maturity that exists within an organization. It can't be more stable than that.

Scalability is fantastic considering their pricing since it addresses their pricing where it can have your incremental scans, which can cut down on your computing costs. That's great for scalability. So, if you have more data and you need to scan more and more, you don't need to scan the exact same data again and again and again. You may be okay only scanning the entire database maybe once a week, and then, let's say daily, you have incremental refreshers that help very much, or that help a lot with scalability. I think as more an organization scales and the more that it uses Purview with that scaling, the more you can get out of it, and the more it'll end up helping the organization, the more the stewards that are in their tagging things, the more that data is suggested, and that triggers are set up for ingestion runs. The more it scales, the better it is.

I have spoken with Purview's product team consisting of engineers who created Purview that writes the documentation that will work on bugs hands-on. Also, I've been a part of a lot of conversations, and I provided a lot of feedback in terms of improving Purview itself as a product and how we use it with our clients. So, there's been a lot of collaboration on that.

Considering Purview, I rate technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

There was not one solution. There were multiple solutions like Profisee involved. We also had Atlas and kind of a lot of commingling of those two and kind of piecemeal together solutions between a lot of those to do a Purview does. So not a whole lot, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

The deployment of the solution was done on Azure. A majority of our deployments for our clients are through a private cloud, and they're locked down with private DNS zones and custom DNS records on the back end if they're on their own servers and private endpoints as well. So fairly locked down, especially with where we talked about a lot of the data being sensitive and a need for it to be protected and monitored. Well, if data needs to be protected and monitored, then it likely is going to be needing something to be secure. So it's all been on a private cloud so far.

I was involved in the initial deployment of Purview. The initial deployments were actually straightforward because we were figuring out about the features, and found that it was a little less feature-rich, so there was less of a question. And it hasn't given us the time to figure out where it works well or where it doesn't work well, and if we need to bring in consultants or can we do this in-house. As Microsoft Purview got a little more mature, the deployments got a little more complex, as we were kind of seeing that there are a lot of ways, like there were a hundred ways to do one thing or less. I think that applies to anything in software. But it applies to Purview as well and where we control access to a given data source while figuring out if we should use the policies and governance features within Purview. We also thought if we should do it in Azure portal using RBAC or should it be elsewhere. So I think we passed that part, and then now we're going to get back to some smooth deployments, and a lot of them will be templatized, you know, whether it be in ARM templates or Bicep like Terraform. Overall, at first, the setup process was fairly smooth to moderate.

I have not been able to conduct any actual ROI analysis on Purview just because it is hard to measure those kinds of intangibles of how those results show up. But they absolutely show up if we consider data to be an asset. Also then, it can also be a liability, just like something that would be like a can of soup on the shelf in a restaurant. That's an asset as it exists then, but also there can be hazards. So, if it's a large pallet, it could fall and cause damage. So, data cost would be a liability. I think that it is not something that currently appears on the balance sheet and can be cut to draw that line, but I think it'll be made much clearer in the near future, especially as we've become more and more data-saturated and we'll be more conscious of the value of data. Regarding ROI, I have not done any analysis in that realm, but I have full confidence that there are real ROIs that do exist and that will show up one way or another in the future.

Price-wise, I think it's very generous and accessible to not just enterprises but small to medium-sized companies as well. I think it's very fair in terms of how they break apart the storage and the actual computing, and that makes it very accessible. So, that is a very big plus for Purview. I think a lot of clients and organizations would feel that way as well.

On the time front, I can absolutely speak about the cost of the solution since time is money. Saving analysts or developers, or engineers time can add or translate into actual savings if you can do the right calculation. But just to stick on that time front, I've seen it cut down, let's say, a given team, or a data governance team, I'd say, in a reduction of fifty to sixty percent of the time that would be spent answering maybe questions for other parts of the business about what a certain data means or where this data lives, they can just point them into certain directions, and they can point them to Purview and have those answers or have or have this questions answered. So that's a big part. And then also being able to have those ties from the business to IT and being able to bridge that gap and being able to have a technical asset ingested from the data side or, from the technical side, and then being able to get the business to interact with that as well. I would say that total savings in terms of on a team-to-team basis, I could see anywhere from fifty to seventy-five percent reduction in time spent on those activities just by having Purview.

After looking through other options, we decided for our clients that in these situations where they're already in a Microsoft data environment in terms of their data, whether it's living in Azure or on-prem, but the analytics that they're doing, whether it be with Power BI, with Synapse and Data Factory, it integrated so well.

Speaking about the importance that Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, including AWS and Google Cloud Platform, I would say that it's very important, and I am going to lean on the side of this that has to do with data protection in terms of international data protection and various laws that kind of force data to stay in certain places. For example, I have one of my clients, which is a Fortune 100 company, and they have three different main regions around the world, including Asia Pacific, the EU, and the US. They had a lot of financial data that were in these three regions, but they couldn't cross each other even though it was the same data that was being used in the same applications, but it was difficult due to various barriers and regulations for the actual data control. Hence, they couldn't pass between each other. So that was kind of an issue. We had to actually go and deploy multiple instances of Purview. We had a dev and a prod instance in these three regions. That was definitely very important, and that was because of not only regulations but because of their desire to keep their data private, secure, and kind of locked down.

Speaking of how important it is for me that Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices and data in other SaaS apps, it is not very important as it's typically with legacy databases and data warehouses.

Regarding Purview's data connector platform for supporting ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources, I think it's very robust, and out of the gate, they included a data connector that you can plug in straight to Amazon and SAP. I believe now that they have some connectors for Salesforce and things like that and Snowflake. So they are absolutely staying right on or ahead of the curve when it comes to making this kind of making sure that the interoperability between other vendors as well is taken into account, which is awesome.

Speaking of how important is Purview's natively integrated compliance across Azure Dynamics and Office, I think it's very important, and it does it very well. I mean, literally without a problem. It's completely seamless, and so it does that perfectly.

Speaking of how important it is to me that Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world, I think that it is very important. So, that's what kind of gave birth to the original classifications for 200 or so out-of-the-box classifications for a lot of data for possible credit card numbers, passport data, and ZIP codes in different countries. They were definitely aware of that, and you could tell from their design process they keep updating those. And so that was definitely built with that in mind for sure.

I have never used Purview for data loss protection. Typically, in these solutions, when we're deploying Purview, they're usually at a stage in their data platform maturity where they already kind of have that taken care of elsewhere.

Speaking of whether Purview helped reduce the number of solutions I need to interact with, I would say that I don't think so because I think data governance exists kind of outside the solution's architecture for these kinds of things. So, I'll say no, but that's not in a bad way. It's just not its job, in my opinion.

In terms of Purview's visibility, I think visibility is the most significant part since that's kind of what it does as long as it's set up correctly and maintained by the data stewards and the business experts. The domain experts that actually know how to interpret these business glossary terms and can link them to data assets, then it is the most useful tool out there.

I haven't used Microsoft Purview's automation. However, I have used Purview's AI since we have had a few situations. While not many organizations have had to do this, we had two instances of Purview in a given tenant, which would be dev and prod. So, we would use some APIs and some Purview CLI. We automated a lot of those processes. Also, it's workflow automation in terms of approvals and sign-offs from a given definition being changed or a term being added and being able to send that to the right people, especially by sending an email to the right group for approval. So the automation piece is huge. I have not yet been a part of, or I have not, used any of the AI-related features.

Speaking of how automation affected my speed and accuracy of risk detection, I would say it went very well, especially when dealing with financial data or when dealing with possible credit card data, personal information, and health data. In PII or PHI, being able to have those classifications kind of flag that data if it comes through, and then being able to mask it or identify those is something huge. So, that's probably one of my favorite features considering how it's integrated into the various protection services that Microsoft and Azure have to offer.

Speaking of how automation affected the quality of the insights I have, I would say it has more to do with speed on that front. Also, it's going to be as good as the developers, data stewards, and experts working on it. As you know, it'll be as good as the effort that they put in to constantly go through and curate or update a certain classification, including what the threshold may be to make sure it's catching all of where it needs to cache for risk detection or risk mitigation. And there's definitely a one-to-one relationship that is a very linear relationship. So the more end users and stewards are involved, the more you get out of it in terms of every feature that it has to offer.

Regarding Purview enabling me to show my compliance in real-time, I would say that I believe that there are some integrations that I have not personally, which I think came out in Purview the last time when I was very heavily involved with Purview, which is maybe four or five months back. So, I have not used those yet. But in terms of real-time, I don't think we have used it yet. But I'm sure we'll do that eventually.

Regarding whether Purview helped to reduce the time to action needed for insider threats, I would say it has, especially in the context of early detection for possible sensitive data, like health data, credit card information, and things like that, and being able to alert the right parties. So, they can make decisions on whether they need a mask or not or if there was a problem with the actual data source, whether the data kind of slipped through, and if it should have been taken out. So, definitely, it works in that kind of early detection there and in terms of the speed of making those decisions.

I would say that Purview has helped save time and money for my clients. So, it's definitely a long road for data governance, and a lot of the benefits aren't necessarily very tangible, so they might not show up on the balance sheet. However, data is an asset and needs to be treated as such. Hence, those who implement these data governance programs and who use Purview to do that are absolutely gonna be ahead of the curve, and we'll save countless dollars and time. I mean, the savings start immediately. So, down the road is when you really see those effects come up.

I would agree that Purview has affected my ability to stay on top of compliance.

Regarding others who are looking into evaluating the solution, I think they should prepare by making sure that the individuals or the teams that internally exist that are in charge of or that have a very large say, and how data governance is or functions within that organization, they need to be on board and they need to be willing to kind of to go through the motions and be okay with having an iterative process once Purview is deployed. It's not all going to be solved on day one, and they're not going to have everything that they need right away. Again, it's a tool that their data storage and domain experts can use, I would say.

As I am trying to be as unbiased as possible, I would suggest those planning to use the solution contact Microsoft since there are a lot of financial incentives and reimbursements, and discounts that exist right now, also in the past, and in the future, I would assume that for Purview's demos and PoC engagements. So, trying to find or just having the first part, which is the internal understanding of what data governance is and what they want out of it, while the second part is Microsoft does very well by tucking in partners that can show them ropes.

Since there were some features recently that maybe I haven't been able to test, I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

We use it for the creation of enterprise PSA, as well as for our enterprise data catalog and data governance.

This is a type of pilot project or proof of concept. Our organization wants to see how it works, how complex the maintenance side will be, and how effective and efficient it will be.

It enables us to show compliance in real-time. However, because it is a pilot project for us, we are not showing the information to other parties yet.

It has definitely helped us reduce our time to action on insider threats. Finding proper data is always challenging in a big organization and this is a really positive aspect of Purview.

The first thing that we were particularly interested in is data lineage. It makes it pretty easy to connect and scan data sources, and do any kind of additional steps like Synapse or SSIS processing.

Overall, I would laud its ease of use, intuitive interface, and easy navigation. It's a very user-friendly product that is easy to work with.

In addition, we considered the issue of multi-cloud and multi-platform environments when we were trying to identify the best tools that would serve all the requirements of our organization. Currently, we are not directly pulling data from AWS. We are working with Azure. But we have the potential in the future to consider such options. This feature is very valuable because we are planning to establish automated data-pulling from AWS.

And the solution's data connector platform for the ingestion of data from non-Microsoft data sources is very easy to use. I investigated what data sources it can work with. It's certainly easy to work with all Microsoft data sources like SQL Server, Synapse, and data lakes, but it also has great functionality working with Oracle. And of particular interest to us is the ability to pull data from Excel, CVS files, and other types of flat files.

Another particularly nice feature is its integration with other services. This is one of the biggest advantages of the solution. For example, if you need to store a key for database access, it's easy to integrate with key vault services.

And a feature that is very important to us is the fact that Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world. Before we started working with Purview, we put great effort into evaluating its capabilities and functionality. We created a comparative matrix with other tools and this was one of the factors we included. We considered it a big positive for Purview.

The scanning of data sources can be scheduled to execute automatically. That is the only automation we are using within the solution.

One area for improvement is the detection of data types. This is really important. It has some of that functionality, but I consider it very limited. Maybe they can add some custom programming, or machine learning could be particularly useful for the detection of the nature of the data.

If it could tell us, for example, when a given type of data is a social security number, that would be helpful. Currently, we need to open it and determine what the format is. We would like to know if a given type of data is PII data.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for almost two years.

I found some defects, through my interaction with the solution, in the reporting system. Purview has its own reporting and I found a function that apparently is not working. There are some bugs in that section, but other than that, everything looks okay. It works well.

We haven't experimented with scaling it, but my perception is that it's very scalable.

We haven't had to contact Microsoft's tech support.

We didn't have a previous solution.

The setup was pretty straightforward. It took us about one week, but a lot of the dependencies are not directly related to Purview. We had to obtain a password and user and that takes some time.

Microsoft takes care of patching, so I haven't seen any need for maintenance by us. It's on the cloud and they take care of it. We don't need to worry about that part at all and that is one of the big advantages of a cloud system.

We did everything in-house. I had architecture and administrative support, but I did the actual work with Azure alone.

I'm handling the proof of concept work. No other organizations have access to it. We don't want people to start using something that is not really complete yet.

Because this is a proof of concept, we haven't seen direct cost savings, but we see it having a positive impact on development work, particularly for BI folks who are interested in self-service and building reports for themselves. This is a very good exploration tool.

Microsoft Purview is the best option I have encountered when it comes to price. Maybe some of my information is outdated, but Microsoft offered it so that you could use it almost without paying. This was a really nice aspect. 

I don't know how Microsoft's pricing stands today, but for us, it was very cheap and effective. We are still paying some money but it's not significant. 

They should look to keep the pricing moderate in the future.

We compared Purview with other solutions, but not on a practical level. We only compared it with the information we were able to find on the internet, including the documentation and the functionality, but we did not install or do anything with the other solutions.

For a large enterprise, it's very important to have tools like this. It's especially useful for IT people who are dealing with data science or who need to find or investigate data or find out what data an organization has. It's also useful for those who maintain a central data warehouse and for people who want self-servicing business intelligence.

At this point, Purview has not reduced the number of solutions we interact with. In the future, we will consider that option. At this point, it operates as a standalone for us, because it is a pilot project in our organization.

Microsoft Purview is not yet a leader in data cataloging or data governance, but I'm pretty sure it will be, given how the tools are evolving and the functionality it already has. At the same time, I'm certainly looking for some of its functionality to improve, including easier integration with Microsoft Power BI.

We are using it for governance on the cloud data migration. When people want to see legacy application Hadoop to Azure, we use the solution to gain some governance aspects and integrate it with Synapse on the final layer, which is the transform layer of the data lake. 

Purview was included at a single location in eastern Canada. There are close to 1,000 users.

It strengthens governance and provides visibility. It gives you better control and reports, then it integrates them with the Microsoft reporting solution. It integrates very well and helps provide visibility, but you need to do a lot of homework before you gain visibility. You need to understand the limitations in each of the data sets to gain visibility from a governance perspective.

For a tech organization, it gives them the ability to lower maintenance costs because it is natively integrated. So, it reduces the number of solutions that need to interact with each other. It is far easier for clients to operate and maintain that solution rather than be worried about a custom or hybrid solution, or even a best-of-breed. This solution makes it tougher because then you can hire people with different skill sets. 

Depending on the pipeline, it enables us to show compliance in real-time. This has sped up the decision-making cycle, making clients more proactive. They can do more internally before responding to compliance requests. For the banks, it is very important for them to be compliant with the standards that they are expected to adopt, e.g., GDPR. This gives them more time to prepare and figure out what the root cause could be if there are gaps.

Because governance analysts have these reports and dashboards out-of-the-box from Purview, they now have more time. For example, in a 40-hour work week, they would gain back three to four hours. So, the decision-making is faster.

Purview gives you more visibility and has native integration. It gives you a heat map regarding your risks. For example, where could there be potential exposure? It can very quickly identify non-compliance. Since it is natively integrated, the catalog tracker can quickly scan it.

It natively integrates. It gives you a lot of controls, awareness, features, and best good practices, making conversations a lot easier with the clients. Features are pre-built. All you have to do is configure it properly, and you get the correct tables and names of the entities with data. This reduces effort and gains efficiency, both for the clients and for SIs (like us). 

It is critical that Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments. That is the number one reason that people are adopting hybrid and best-of-the-breed approaches. Especially in banking, it is critical because people want to protect, govern, and secure their data. This is one of the first conversations that happen with security and the architecture group on the client side.

It is a heterogeneous environment. That is a desire that the clients are asking for increasingly. So, the feature that provides data protection for iOS, Mac, Android, and data in other SaaS apps is pretty important.

Batch sources can connect well.

It works very well, but there are some limitations because it is a new product. For a lot of features, you need to wait until the time that Microsoft announces that they are generally available. Or, a lot of times, some features are not even available. Then, you need to go through their support channel. So, it's a mixed bag.

The API needs some improvement when connecting to non-Microsoft API sources. This is a limiting factor.

The integration with modern data warehouses needs a lot more traction. Because clients will not always adopt Microsoft Azure as their cloud, as they can choose to be in a heterogeneous environment. For example, I have three warehouses: Synapse, Snowflake, and Amazon Redshift. In this case, I would hesitate to adopt Purview, as it is not the best choice at this point in time.

I have been using it since it was launched in 2021.

The reliability is very good, but the stability is evolving as Microsoft is trying to challenge the established leaders with new features.

It is middleweight from a maintenance perspective, as there are two people from the client side at one site maintaining this, technically and functionally. There is a lot of leg work needed on the functional side. 

You need to keep an eye on it when applying a new patch or version from the cloud. You need to be very careful of how you upgrade that so it does not undo your customizations.

It scales without issues. In terms of performance, it scales pretty well.

Out-of-the-box, it is fairly easy to use the features. The clients have been happy overall, but they struggled when they tried to extend it to other applications in the cloud. This is getting better, from what I understand, as they release more feature enhancements.

The technical support is good. They respond quickly, though it depends on your license. If you have Premier Support, they will respond. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate them between eight and nine. They are trying to improve.

Positive

We did previously use another solution.

We had a client who decided to move to a single platform in the cloud. Azure was chosen because of its native dataset and proximity, e.g., the platform closest to the existing state of affairs. That is why Azure was chosen and the major reason for Purview to get adopted.

The initial setup is pretty complex. When you make it a private cloud, the security makes the setup complex. The public cloud is far easier. With a private cloud, you do the configuration to the right security standards and norms. You have to do the extra groundwork to make that happen. That took us a long time, but that is okay. Once it was done, it worked fine.

The first step is migration, making it visible and gaining efficiency. Then, you let it stabilize and clients get it. Phase two might be more automated, having some intelligence with AI for more decision-making.

I did the implementation with a Purview team of eight to 10 people. This included a governance analyst, data analyst, Purview expert, SMA, developer, and functional analyst. I was the overall delivery lead overseeing the effort, then there was a lead on governance.

Clients are happy and seeing the benefits. However, it is too early to determine ROI.

We also evaluated Collibra and AWS.

We haven't explored data loss protection at this point in time because the client has a very specific, in-house utility tool that they wanted to retain for DLP.

Make your case. Do your homework. Know your roadmap, which is critical with Microsoft and adopting Purview. 

I would rate the solution somewhere between an eight and nine out of 10.