Microsoft Purview Data Governance Reviews

My organization had a large amount of sensitive data stored primarily in SharePoint Online. We also operate in a highly regulated industry. Therefore, we wanted to take advantage of some of the features offered by Microsoft Purview. Initially, we focused on sensitivity and retention labels, but we later expanded to include data loss prevention and benchmarking our data against the built-in regulations offered by Purview.

It is important that Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments. Many organizations have multiple systems, which can be difficult to manage. I know that many of my clients are currently trying to amalgamate their systems and bring them all under one umbrella, but there will always be cases where organizations will not be able to have everything in a single software solution like Microsoft 365. Being able to take advantage of Purview's excellent features and deploy them across not only 365 but also other systems makes it much easier. I think this is one of the reasons why organizations are starting to look at things like Purview: it has the ability to deploy more widely, saving organizations a lot of time and effort and centralizing control.

It is important that Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices, as well as other data and SaaS apps. Many organizations issue portable devices to their staff, especially those with a high percentage of hybrid remote workers. These mobile devices have become essential, both personally and professionally. Having governance across multiple devices is a brilliant feature.

Purview's integrated data link compliance is a great feature. The biggest selling point for me is the ability to deploy it from one location; I haven't been able to manage everything in one place before. This makes it much easier for local administrators, and it can also be used across different environments.

The connectors for supporting non-Microsoft data sources are a brilliant feature and a smart move by Microsoft. They allow us to apply our governance policies to data sources such as Twitter and WhatsApp, which are used by many organizations for customer interaction. This is important because it allows us to protect our customers' data, even when they are interacting with us on multiple platforms.

My experience of the critical regulations that Purview was built taking into account is predominantly UK regulations. When I first started at my organization,  part of my role was data protection. So being able to benchmark our data against the GDPR and some of the UK's specific regulations was fantastic. But now I work with multinational clients, so we have offices in various locations in different geographies. So having specific legislation for the areas in which they operate is brilliant. More organizations are spread across different continents and countries. So being able to apply different legislation to different parts of their estate depending on where their offices are operating is a fantastic feature.

We are currently updating our data loss prevention policy internally, and we highly recommend that our clients use Microsoft Purview for DLP as well. I demonstrated Purview to a client a few months ago, and they were incredibly impressed with how effective it can be. I think they were particularly surprised by how quickly it can identify sensitive data. For example, we did a quick test where we uploaded a document that contained a piece of personal information that we had asked the Purview policy to look for. As soon as we uploaded the document to a SharePoint document library, we received an email alert warning us that the sensitive information was present and could be accessed by others. The alert was almost instantaneous. This shows that Purview is a very effective system for protecting data.

Microsoft Purview has enabled us to truly embed a culture of data governance among staff. This has been a major success, not just within our own organization, but also with our partners and clients. Many people talk about the importance of data governance, but Purview has helped us to increase the knowledge base of our users and empower them to take ownership of their data, rather than relying solely on IT professionals or data protection staff. This is a real positive for any business, especially those that work with sensitive information. The automation capabilities of Purview have also been a huge hit with our users. The ability to automatically apply data labels and implement advanced encryption policies has made it much easier for us to protect our data.

In previous years, we have used various methods and systems to try to achieve the same outcome, including spreadsheets and stand-alone systems. We are heavy users of Microsoft 365, so it is our primary system, but we also use other systems. Having one solution that can deploy our core policies and protections across different devices and platforms.

Microsoft Purview's reduction of solutions simplified our data governance. In the past, our data was scattered across different locations, making it difficult to manage and protect. Purview has brought our data together into one place, making it easier for users to access and for us to implement data governance policies. I believe that the more systems we have, the greater the risk of data protection incidents and the more difficult it is to deploy a unified data governance strategy. Reducing the complexity of our IT infrastructure goes hand-in-hand with improving data governance.

Some of the features in Purview have illuminated areas of our data site. In particular, when we have worked with organizations with large volumes of data, it has helped us to identify issues. For example, benchmarking our state against GDPR highlighted aspects of our operations that were not compliant. This was more important than the areas that were compliant, as it helped us to focus our attention on where we needed to make improvements. This helps us to provide assurance to our board.

We are about to launch an internal awareness campaign about AI and how we can use it. Microsoft Purview is on the list of AI solutions we will be considering. We are also about to start using Microsoft Copilot, and some of our staff are already using ChatGPT. We are looking at AI solutions within Microsoft 365 and some of our other systems. This is an area that we are very keen to develop, and it is something that our clients are also interested in. We can explore this in more detail in the coming months.

I've been amazed at how quickly the automation responds, especially when we have a large dataset. It takes that pain away from Teams and acts as a monitor for us. It's saved a huge amount of time, and once it can demonstrate internally or to clients how effectively it does what they expect it to do, that will save more time, but people who are responsible for this information need a lot of reassurance.

Purview enables us to demonstrate our compliance in real-time. We provide live reports to auditors and anyone responsible for information security risk management. We can show them our compliance status in real-time, which is excellent.

Our meetings with compliance regulators are positive when they are familiar with Purview. However, if they are not, we must be able to demonstrate to them how effective the solution is and how it can assist the organization in improving its data governance and data security. This has made the meetings much more positive, as the regulators are more assured that we are being more responsive and effective with the information we hold.

Automation plays a significant role in reducing the time to action on insider threats. We have had procedures in place for identifying, mitigating, and responding to specific risks, both internally and accidentally. However, our previous procedures were very manual, which obviously takes time. Now, in some situations, we can respond almost instantly. Automation has significantly improved our response time. Data breaches, for example, used to take a long time to investigate under our old process. From when a user reported a breach to when we could start investigating, it took hours to complete the necessary paperwork and documentation. But by using automation and some of the features in PurView, we've been able to reduce that time to minutes. In some areas, we've probably been able to reduce investigation time by 50 percent or more.

Time-saving is probably the most important benefit of automation and AI. The more time we can save people, across the board, not just Purview, the better. When we can automate tasks and improve response times, it takes away the need for manual input and frees people to concentrate on more important things. This naturally has a financial benefit. From my role, I've seen that the time savings have been really important. In some areas, we've seen time savings of up to 50 percent. So, when deployed properly, the benefits of automation and AI are huge.

Our ability to oversee compliance using Purview has been a game-changer. We have developed our own in-house compliance and risk management software, which I have been involved in. However, using Purview has been even more impactful. In addition to the automation and time savings, the key thing for us is the educational aspect. Purview helps us to raise awareness and make the organization more data-aware, regardless of role. This enables us to identify issues and, more importantly, rectify them.

The sensitivity and retention options in Purview are excellent. We had an internal document retention schedule, but when we first created it, much of our data was in paper form. As our data became digitized and moved to SharePoint Online, particularly when we migrated away from our on-premises file server, the ability to replicate that retention schedule in Purview and deploy it across all of our SharePoint sites and OneDrive made life so much easier. Purview helped us automate and control our data without having to rely on people to manually tag documents with specific retention periods.

Similarly, our sensitivity labels were scattered throughout SharePoint Online. We wanted to push data governance internally, not just from a technical data management perspective, but also from an education perspective. So, we created a data classification system based on sensitivity and deployed it across our 365 apps, including Outlook, OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint. This not only allowed us to protect more sensitive data and ensure that it was being handled responsibly, but it also allowed us to use features like prompting users to apply a label to a document before interacting with it. This helped us deploy labels more quickly and also got staff thinking about the data they were working with.

In my experience, particularly in organizations that work with a lot of sensitive data, staff can become complacent over time and desensitized to the importance of looking after that data if they're using it day in and day out. So, having a visual prompt to apply a label and think about the documents they're working with and what that means was a really useful way of promoting data governance across our business.

Some of the menu headings may not be easy to understand for some people. For example, when I first used Purview, I noticed that one of the self-compliance centers had changed its name. Microsoft has done a huge amount of updates, and sometimes it's hard to keep track of what Purview can do. We almost constantly have to explore it.

Maybe Microsoft could have a 365 roadmap where we can look at upcoming features, or some kind of bulletin announcement for Purview users that explains new features and what they can do in simple terms.

We could also look at the menu settings. In my experience of using Purview, we've never used it as an exclusive system for IT professionals or technical staff. We were very keen that other specialists around the business made use of some of these features because we thought that some of what Purview could do was relevant to other departments as well as IT. For example, we have HR managers and financial staff who use it.

I think that some of the terminology in Purview is pitched toward IT and tech professionals, and it may not be immediately understood by other specialists. This is something that could be improved.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for three years.

I haven't seen any issues so far with stability. I know that some policies can take a little bit of time to roll out, depending on how widely they're being deployed. For example, the first sensitivity policy I created took 24-48 hours to start functioning for users. However, this is to be expected in the cloud, as it can take time for changes to filter down. Once the policy became available, I didn't see any issues with it at all.

Microsoft Purview is scalable. When I first deployed it, we deliberately scaled it up by deploying a small number of cache users first, then an individual team, and eventually ramping it up across all of our SharePoint environments, we were able to deploy it widely across Teams, OneDrive, and Outlook as well.

All the interactions I've had with the technical support, they've been really good. So I've got no complaints at all.

Positive

Previously we had processes in place for things like data protection, naming conventions, and so on, but we were very reliant on our IT infrastructure for governance. Purview has allowed us to act more effectively and quickly, and to get more people involved at an administrator level. This has been empowering for some teams, particularly HR, which can now run policies appropriate for them without having to rely on IT. This has been a very positive change for those teams.

Purview was straightforward to deploy, but complex to bring staff up to speed. Like any organization, we have people with varying levels of understanding of these systems and what they are trying to achieve. So, while it was easy for our team members to create and deploy Purview, the education piece took time. For example, we deployed sensitivity and retention labels on a team-by-team basis, training each team and bringing them up to speed before moving on. We found this to be the easiest way to deliver the training internally. Overall, I think Purview is very straightforward from a technical point of view, but the difficulty of bringing staff up to speed will vary depending on the organization.

A core group of eight of us evaluated the various aspects of what Purview could do. We took ownership of the areas that applied to our roles or departments to deploy sensitivity and retention policies. It took us four months. We only took a few days to create the policies and set up the labels. However, we wanted to manage the rollout carefully because training was key to ensuring that staff would get the most out of the system. So, we didn't rush the rollout. However, the actual technical side, the creation itself, only took a few days, or a couple of meetings.

We recommend Purview to clients and don't know if they see an ROI. However, in my previous role at a previous organization, we used Purview internally. I cannot speak to exact figures, but I do know that our creditors regularly reviewed our viability, and data governance, data assurance, and data protection. Being able to demonstrate that we have these tools available to make us more secure as an organization and to protect the sensitive information we hold obviously had an effect on our reputation and viability in the eyes of our creditors and auditors. As a business, I would say that we felt Purview was worth the investment in that particular situation.

To get the full features of Purview, we currently need E5 enterprise licenses, which are expensive. I'm not sure what Microsoft's business model is for this, because we can acquire some of the features of Purview, or we can access it by speaking to our Microsoft partners or vendors. But I think Microsoft is currently pitching Purview primarily to medium to large organizations. I believe there is a real appetite for data governance in smaller businesses as well because all businesses have information that needs to be protected and governed effectively. I have clients who own small businesses who cannot justify the cost of E5 enterprise licenses. Some of them are on business standard or business premium licenses. I think Microsoft should consider reducing the price of Purview or making it more available to more people. Perhaps Microsoft could offer a scaled-down version of Purview. I know there is an appetite for Purview among smaller businesses, but they often have to do a cost-benefit analysis and decide that the additional cost is not justified. It's a shame because they would really benefit from some of the features of Purview.

I would rate Microsoft Purview nine out of ten. Purview is a highly effective and useful feature in Microsoft 365. As a technical system, it is brilliant. However, I am concerned that it may be too expensive for smaller businesses, which is a shame.

The first time I used and rolled out Purview, it was for multiple departments in a medium-sized business. By the end of the rollout, everyone was using it. Internally, we have deployed Purview to two of our geographical locations, but we still have some others to roll it out to. With my clients, the ones who have shown an interest in Purview and are using it tend to be larger businesses that work across geographies. They are deploying Purview to their various office locations in different countries. The speed of deployment depends on the size of the company. We have 150 users.

Purview needs to be reviewed periodically to ensure that the policies are still appropriate and effective. We have tried to automate as much of this process as possible, so from a maintenance point of view, Purview does not require much manual effort. However, we do have a core group of people who regularly review Purview to stay ahead of new features and to determine whether they are appropriate for our organization.

We are currently reviewing some of the new features and redoing many of our policies. In some cases, we are considering switching from manual hard copy or written policies to policies in Purview, either to work alongside their document or to replace it. We will be gearing up for this transition soon.

I would test Purview, explore its features, and seek advice from people who have used it or from Microsoft themselves. This would help me to understand what it can do. I think it is important to avoid keeping Purview as an IT-only tool. Instead, promote its capabilities to a wider audience, including other stakeholders. Once creating and deploying solutions in Purview, I recommend deploying them to a targeted area first and then scaling them up. If a retention policy is suddenly deployed across the entire estate, people may not understand what they are looking at and may resist using it. My advice is to learn about Purview, share the learned knowledge with others, and involve other areas of the business in its deployment. Also, think carefully about how to deploy Purview in a way that minimizes disruption.

Our primary use case for Microsoft Purview Data Governance was to classify documents and ensure that people were getting the information they were supposed to. We initially adopted it internally before working with customers. We use it for both internal purposes and as a selling point.

It has helped to ensure that employees don't access content they shouldn't and has improved our organizational processes. Familiarity with Microsoft Purview also helps us sell the product.

The visibility has helped tremendously. We can see where documents are stored and the security that has been applied. It helps to see where things are from one place.

The reporting is excellent. Limiting what people can see is also valuable, especially when tagging documents. Purview's ability to connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices is critical. This is a huge selling point because people use various devices in their companies. 

The solution's multi-cloud capabilities will be increasingly essential as we expand into AWS. We don't do a lot of GCP, but using Purview as a single point of truth is huge. 

The fact that Purview is built based on critical regulations is crucial because we deal with so many kinds of customers. We have to talk to them about what they can and can't do according to their requirements and the regulations they're under.

Auto-tagging should be available at lower levels of licensing. Right now, a high level of licensing is needed for auto-tagging, and this feature should be made available at a lower license level.

I have been using Microsoft Purview Data Governance for at least five years.

The stability is great.

Scalability is also great. We haven't encountered any issues.

I try to avoid opening tickets with Microsoft due to long response times, which is frustrating. We tend to use Microsoft documentation and Microsoft Learn instead.

Positive

Previously, we relied on permissions in Windows on file shares, but Microsoft Purview works much better.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, but manual tagging was challenging because people needed to get used to it.

We did not use an integrator.

We don't specifically look at ROI in a traditional sense. What's crucial is keeping information secure and accessible.

The auto-tagging feature should be available at a lower licensing level.

We did not evaluate other solutions. Microsoft Purview's inclusion in licensing made it an obvious choice.

I rate Microsoft Purview Data Governance eight out of 10. It loses points because auto-tagging is only available at higher licensing levels.

Microsoft Purview helps our business identify valuable information across various data types by using machine learning and customizable tags. It then allows users to export this data with PowerShell and combine it with metadata from other Microsoft products, facilitating both data analysis and migration processes.

While I haven't used Purview's cross-platform capabilities, I'm impressed by Microsoft's integration of its various solutions, including ComplianceOne and SharePoint, which cater to large enterprises. A deep dive into the functionality confirmed this positive impression.

The ability of Microsoft Purview to connect across devices, including Macs like mine, is a major benefit. While I was surprised to find PowerShell running smoothly on Mac, Purview itself has been user-friendly and avoided the issues I've read about online. This ease of use is crucial for me.

My previous projects focused on M365, but the next step is integrating Azure Virtual Machines into our solutions. In this context, Purview's ability to natively integrate compliance across both Azure Dynamics and Office 365 is crucial for ensuring our work scales effectively.

The biggest advantage of Purview is its ability to centralize data management. This multi-platform tool integrates data assets from across the company, providing a reliable and unified way to handle data procedures. This consistency, a hallmark of Microsoft products, is valuable for many users.

Designed for our regulated environment, Purview offers a variety of features that enable us to develop compliant solutions even when limitations seem to restrict what's achievable.

Purview has helped save us time through automation.

The most valuable aspect of Purview is its PowerShell connectivity, enabling automation. The content explorer helps visualize how classifiers, including custom-sensitive information types, identify content. Purview even allows testing these custom types with a dedicated button. Overall, PowerShell governance and export capabilities significantly improve our workflow by automating tasks and simplifying data extraction.

While Microsoft Purview addresses global regulations, it lacks out-of-the-box functionality. Extensive development is needed to define sensitive information types and train rectifiers for each customer. Most importantly, Purview currently lacks multi-language support, hindering its use in multilingual environments. Since communication compliance is the only exception, future updates should include sensitive information types and keywords in major languages, especially those relevant to the European Union. This would require customization efforts to create equivalents for these information types and keywords in other languages.

The rapid pace of feature changes in Purview, including marketing shifts, retirements, merges, and splits, creates challenges. Documentation struggles to keep up, leaving users behind. Further compounding this issue is the inconsistency of PowerShell modules. While some, like the SAP exporter, function well, others, like the trainable classifier's missing fetch module, significantly limit the usability of a potentially valuable feature. This lack of polish hinders automation efforts and makes data governance assessments more difficult.

Setting up Purview in a production tenant proved challenging due to a lack of clear documentation on permission requirements. While Purview offers role-based access with custom role creation, there's no built-in explanation of each role's function and associated permissions. Microsoft Learn documentation wasn't helpful either. Ideally, Purview should provide in-context information about each role within the portal, eliminating the need for cryptic names and extensive external research.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for under one year.

Microsoft Purview seems to be functioning, but there's a lack of clarity on how it analyzes data. The content explorer shows inconsistencies, with Microsoft acknowledging that the actual document count might differ from what's displayed. This suggests limitations in the current setup. While improvement is desirable, it's still a usable tool.

I submitted a support request in the test tenant, possibly specific to that environment. However, the Purview quality was lacking. Automatic replies didn't address my question, which seemed misplaced within the chosen topic. It felt like I contacted the wrong department. Instead of offering real support, they suggested I write a public blog post seeking help online. This was essentially non-existent support, potentially due to limited resources for test tenant users. It's unclear if this reflects the quality of support for the expensive enterprise licenses.

While deploying Purview itself was easy for me after I had spent significant time getting a Microsoft certification, onboarding junior colleagues who haven't had that preparation is proving more challenging. Despite their initial confusion, the overall structure and features of Purview seem well-organized and at least decent.

While a single person could deploy Purview in this instance because it's a test tenant, it's important to clarify that this ease of deployment applies only to the test environment and wouldn't be representative of the process for a production tenant.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Microsoft Purview is a subscription-based service, so we need either an E3 or E5 license to use it. The specific features we have access to within Purview depend on which of these licenses we have.

I would rate Microsoft Purview eight out of ten.

To choose the best Purview subscription for your needs, I recommend using a test tenant to explore Purview's features and value proposition. This will help you identify the most critical functionalities and choose the subscription that best aligns with your business requirements.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neutral

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

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

I do it myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get someone who is experienced in deploying it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

I have seen a 100% return on investment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Microsoft Purview for three years.

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Purview does not require any maintenance.

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

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

I give Microsoft Purview an eight out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Microsoft Purview for three years.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate Microsoft Purview nine out of ten.

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

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