Microsoft Purview Data Governance Reviews

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.

I'm an implementer and an integrator. In my last project, I used Purview for a government organization, so we primarily used it for data governance and data lineage. We haven't used it with Microsoft 365. It's a portal that takes data from SQL Server and the data lake. We mainly work on the data governance and security side. About 20 business analysts use Purview. The company has around 100 people in the department.

Microsoft Purview helps us manage data in various formats like Dynamic SQL. It performs two procedures. The primary function is to ingest the SQL database and modify the data type or column name. It also manages the data types and all the metadata related to the tables and columns. It puts everything in one place in the call view or the description pertaining to the business logic, plus the column-level descriptions.

It streamlines things by reducing the number of solutions that must interact with each other. When everything was done manually, each program maintained its own version of the Excel file. Now, it's in one central place, and I can go to Purview to manage the permissions.

By centralizing everything, Purview gives senior management greater visibility into their data. It also makes the data more accessible to non-technical people who need to access the data daily. It's easy for an admin to provide them access if they need to check something quickly. 

Purview checks compliance in real-time. It's helpful when we're meeting with regulators. We must follow European data regulations, so we must manage security and access. We need to show them a log of who had access, who gave it to them, and how many days they had access. That is all shown in Purview, plus other columns like the NHS identification numbers, etc. 

I rate Purview a six out of ten for its ability to help us stay on top of compliance. The product is still not mature enough. There are so many servers on Purview.

I like Purview's data discovery features. It automatically scans and identifies all the fields. In the last project, the customer required us to have some of the codes we specified in this, and we had to structure the codes in a specific way. We can define the structure. 

Previously, everything used Excel, so everyone had their own version of the same spreadsheet with different data, and they were managing it on SharePoint. That's why we moved it to Purview. 

Purview's privileged access manager helps us explore user access rights within the data lake. We use the data lineage and governance features. It can also explore secret data, but we still haven't implemented this feature. It has secure connectors for non-Microsoft sources, which is critical. We're bringing in files from storage. Purview connects to storage, scans it, and edits the required information. 

We've had a few issues with the scanner. It runs perfectly one day, and on another day, it will run the whole night. It's probably related to the rules. If I set some compliance rules and apply the rules to any column, I can't delete it. I have to disable it and reactivate it.

We have two instances. One is for everything, and the other is for the production environment. Sometimes there is a bug when the scan runs overnight. When we come in the next morning, it's still running, so we have to stop and restart it. This is costly.

I have used Purview for a year and a half. 

I rate Purview a six out of ten for stability. 

Purview is scalable. You can integrate it with on-premise solutions and third-party products. 

I rate Microsoft's support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Our client was using Informatica. We used Purview for this project because the client has everything on Azure. It's better to use Purview when you work on Azure. We compared Informatica's available features with Purview's, and the client decided to go with Purview because of all the services in Azure. Microsoft is constantly adding new features to Purview.

Deploying Purview is straightforward. We deployed manually by creating services in Azure. The initial setup took five or six months. After that, we spent some time setting up the scan rules and defining the structure. I deployed the solution along with three other people. We worked with one or two people from Microsoft during the deployment. We have an excellent relationship with Microsoft, and they're helpful when we have any questions. 

We've seen a return from using Purview because it's more accessible to high-level managers without technical knowledge. 

Purview's price is pretty high when you factor in storage costs. 

I rate Microsoft Purview a six out of ten. It's a good service if you only use Azure. If you have an on-prem environment or use another cloud provider, you can compare Purview to other solutions. 

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.

Our IT team, data engineering team, and data science team all rely on Microsoft Purview for a unified data repository. We maintain a table for storing sensitive data with segregated access. To readily understand the data types within, anyone can simply leverage Microsoft Purview's classification system. By selecting a specific classification, users gain access to relevant table details.

If we create keys for non-Microsoft data sources, we can leverage Purview's data connector platform to connect and ingest the data.

It is good that Purview takes into account critical regulations from around the world.

Microsoft Purview has greatly improved our organization's ability to view and share permissions with minimal human intervention. Searching for desired information is now a breeze. However, integrating permissions for access in large environments can be a stumbling block. With ten departments, granting access to a single table for one department is straightforward. But when access to multiple tables is required, they must go through the main administrator for verification.

Microsoft Purview shows us compliance in real-time.

Data segregation is the most valuable feature. This provides clear visibility into the hierarchy of data flow, including its destinations, loading points, and table updates.

While Microsoft Purview offers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, granting access in such complex settings can be lengthy and expensive.

Every scan we perform incurs a charge, making exploration quite costly.

I would like to have complete video documentation for training.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for six months.

In my experience with Microsoft Purview for our data governance project, I'd rate its stability at a seven out of ten. While it excels during exploration phases with use cases and demos, we encountered some challenges during implementation.

Each time we contact Microsoft support, the support person seems new and has to look into the issue because they've never encountered it before.

Neutral

Deploying initially is simple. It only takes as long as creating a storage account in the Azure portal, which is quick.

Microsoft Purview is expensive.

I would rate Microsoft Purview a seven out of ten.

Our current clients are medium-sized businesses.

In the six months we have been using Microsoft Purview it has not required any maintenance.

The main use case is DLP, for alerts and insider risk management.

It is very important for our organization because ours is a very data-heavy organization. We process a lot of data on a daily basis, and we need to check where the data is coming from, how it is being classified, where it is being sent, and whether it is being used by the intended user. We need all the security controls.

We have clarity and visibility at a granular level. We can check data at rest or in transit—where data is coming from and where it is going—on-premises as well as in cloud solutions. That's how it is helpful.

The attack surface has been reduced significantly. Earlier, we didn't have any visibility into it.Now, we review every log to know where data is coming from and where it is going, as well as who is handling it. And all our employees also know that if they are doing anything mischievous, someone is watching them.

In terms of time saved, we write a policy, get an alert, and work on it. It has reduced a lot of human intervention while checking all the logs. It gives us the log source that we can check directly.

The best part is that I can create classifications per my requirements. I use it to classify multiple platforms like AWS, GCP, Azure, and different file sharing systems.

I also like the auto-labeling and the encryption of data when it is being sent out of the organization.

We also need complete coverage for every device that is connecting in our environment, so it's important that Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices.

We just started using Purview DLP for macOS endpoints. We deployed it and
we are fine-tuning the policies. The macOS support is a very important factor because most of the teams handle data. We need to check whether they are sending any source code and how they are handling the data. We need to know whether they are using a key management system to handle secrets.

The fact that Purview was built to account for regulations around the world is important for us. It has to keep updated regarding all regulations because our users are across the globe. If we don't know the regulation data, retention policies, and other policies regarding the data, we may not be in compliance with those policies, and our company will have to pay a hefty fine.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for about two years.

It is a stable product. The stability is an eight out of 10.

Support should be improved in the form of good documentation and video lessons where a person can check things out. There is a community, but it takes a lot of time if we want to get an answer to a question. There should be an easy-to-reach place where, if you're stuck, the support system is there.

Neutral

The deployment was straightforward. We got help from Microsoft support's FastTrack. They helped us deploy it.

As for maintenance, we have to update the policies.

Overall, the only problem is the support system, which is a bit costly. But the product is good.

Our process for potential policy violations is to first check whether something is a true positive or a false positive; we check the document that is being sent. We then check it from our team's side, the responder's side, and then we check it with the compliance team. We look at the policies that have been violated and also check the business use case where something is being sent outside the organization. It's a manual effort for one of our teams.

As for educating users on how to best handle sensitive data, that is done by our compliance team. They do awareness training for our end users and send them awareness emails as well as monthly connections where they give them awareness information about how to handle sensitive data.

We are only using Purview for DLP on the incident-response side and for data protection. So I'm not sure whether it has reduced the number of solutions in the stack we are using, but it is very useful for us.

And although I'm not involved with the compliance side, we can check the compliance dashboard to deal with compliance-related issues. We have a dedicated team that checks it.