Microsoft Purview Data Governance Reviews

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 see many customers these days looking into Microsoft Purview syntax and mainly using the solution for data lineage and data governance. The customer wants to be able to understand data a bit more within the organization and be able to classify and protect sensitive data and understand what it is. 

My company works with the healthcare and financial sectors.

Microsoft Purview can give good information on the cause of the breach, and that comes into the forefront of many organizations nowadays to know how to protect data not only from external sources but also internally as well.

Much of the feedback I get from customers on how Microsoft Purview improves organizations is around the visibility factor at the end of the day. It's all about protecting data and ensuring you don't lose data externally and internally.

Many customers also say that Microsoft Purview also helps simplify the management of data governance policies, as it gives you visibility, automation, and authentication. For example, you can now see classifications whether your documents meet specific criteria or not, through Microsoft Purview.

From my experience and customer feedback, one of the most valuable features of Microsoft Purview is ease of use, especially for content hosted within Microsoft 365 and Azure. You can connect Microsoft Purview to different sources.

I also like that the pricing model for the solution is reasonable, though that would depend on how much you use. That makes it much easier for people to have that initial setup, get started, and see all of the information straight away. If you want a more complex Microsoft Purview setup, you may have to contact a consultant for more technical aspects to enable the solution. Still, one of the most significant selling points for me is the setup, including the automation experience.

Microsoft Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multiple-platform environments, including AWS and GCP, which I find very important because if you look at the percentage of customers that have multiple automated channels or multiple-platform setups, it's very, very high, primarily because customers don't put eggs in one basket.

It's also essential for me that Microsoft Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices, including other SaaS apps, as I spend quite a lot of my time using my iPhone and iPad, whether for a webinar at the end of the day while I'm preparing dinner, and that's still the same information on my company laptop or desktop, which means I still need to ensure that the data I access is still very secure. 

Though you can protect yourself with multifactor authentication, people find ways to get past that, so you have to ensure that even if someone's getting into your organization now, the location within is siloed, and you could see the different classification levels that could easily be applied, making it more difficult for that person to get what he needs easily, compared to SharePoint that's open to everyone, making it a walk in the park, so what Microsoft Purview is able to provide is very important in this hybrid age.

I find Microsoft Purview very important in its natively integrated compliance across Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365, as you'll have sensitive content stored these days, especially if you're an organization with a lot of customer data in your database. Microsoft Purview helps secure customer records and also has a data loss prevention feature, plus data governance and compliance features that I find very important for organizations.

Microsoft Purview has also helped reduce the number of solutions my company needed. The solution is part of the project Microsoft has rapidly been developing, and over the years, the components of the Microsoft services went through a confusing renaming cycle. There were a lot of different services, but I've found out how each should be used, such as for security and compliance, some complementing technologies for identification, classification, traffic, and AI, for example, that I'm continuing to evaluate. At first, there was a bit of confusion, but now it all makes sense.

The simplicity of the number of solutions made data governance a lot easier. With Microsoft Purview, you won't have to interact with a substantial amount of systems, and I'm a firm believer that more risk could arise when you introduce more complexity into a solution or system you're developing. The services you make use of could sometimes deprecate and change features. Hence, having compliance, governance, automation, and data discovery features in one solution, such as Microsoft Purview, makes my life and the customer's life easier.

A key feature of Microsoft Purview for me is that it was built while considering critical regulations worldwide. My company works with organizations where there's usually a requirement for compliance, such as GDPR. I also work with many Germany-based customers that require GWC compliance, and there's strictness with the way data is stored and classified. You must advise and know all regulations, which Microsoft Purview enables you to do. For example, if you look at the amount of data in terms of size, such as the terabytes being housed in various websites, there's no way you could get the information without Microsoft Purview. There's too much data within organizations now, and all it takes is a tiny percentage of that data to be shared in the wrong way or be leaked, which could incur substantial fines, so Microsoft Purview is a product that justifies itself in that very premise.

Microsoft Purview has also enabled visibility, giving customers an overview of how much data is compliant. The solution also provides visibility into the quality of data, movement, and performance, so visibility is another valuable feature of Microsoft Purview.

My company uses the AI and automation features of Microsoft Purview, which I find very critical within the solution. The speed and accuracy of risk detection improved with  AI and automation features because classifying data is easier now, giving me a headstart. The AI can do essential, light work, going around all of the various containers within the organization, so the team only does twenty percent of the work now, such as management, reviews, and reports.

Microsoft Purview AI and automation make it less admin-intensive from a data protection and compliance point of view. If you look into a role within an organization, for example, I'm a DPO, which is a relatively new role. With Microsoft Purview, you'd only need one to two people full-time, another key benefit of the solution. The rest of the work would continue to fall on the shoulders of the IT team, which is stretched in organizations today.

The solution enables you to show real-time compliance. Microsoft Purview gives you the necessary data because it ties into the compliance scores when you eliminate instances. Right now, there are a lot of backlog reports in terms of compliance on static IPs, data leakage, lineage, and backup.

Real-time compliance data provided by Microsoft Purview has helped organizations, especially in terms of meeting with compliance regulators. I helped organizations with technical enablement, mainly stakeholders who requested assistance, and the reporting in Microsoft Purview has taken so much responsibility from the hands of stakeholders. The solution has better reporting that has broken down data for organizations, giving headlines and figures you usually won't easily catch, which makes successful deployment a lot easier.

Microsoft Purview has also helped reduce the time to action on insider threats, whether fraud or rest protection. Organizations, especially huge financial organizations, are bothered by threats, and Microsoft Purview has been beneficial. In terms of how much the solution reduced the time to action on insider threats, based on all industries I've worked with, it's twenty to twenty-five percent. I'm basing this figure on the fact that the automation from Microsoft Purview is very powerful, and the solution gives accurate protection. If you get an alert from Microsoft Purview, it's usually for valid reasons.

Overall, Microsoft Purview has affected the ability of customers or organizations to stay on top of compliance. You see many good products in the market, but if you have a customer  mainly using Microsoft products, such as Dynamics 365, CRM, etc., and the customer belongs to the financial industry or the public sector, for example, that's dealing with information, it's a no-brainer to have Microsoft Purview in the organization.

One drawback of Microsoft Purview, though it's beneficial and easy to use, is that when you start plugging in connectors for third-party sources when setting the solution up for data collection, it becomes a bit more tricky. There's limited documentation, so it's not as intuitive as setting up other parts of Microsoft Purview. If the process of connecting with third-party cloud providers and other SaaS products could be simplified, that would make Microsoft Purview a better product.

In terms of how Microsoft Purview supports ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources, from a user experience point of view, it's a bit more challenging and results in a bit more struggle in that area. Overall, it's decent, but it would benefit customers if Microsoft spent more time and energy improving that experience and getting it on par with other Microsoft products. Microsoft could make it a lot easier to build connections with other cloud vendors, such as AWS and GCS. Microsoft will get there eventually, but it needs to understand its customer base and look at the percentage.

I've been using Microsoft Purview for a year and a half, particularly getting up to speed with the current version. However, Microsoft had different iterations of the solution that my company used in the past two years.

Microsoft Purview is a very stable solution.

Microsoft Purview is a scalable solution, and that's the beauty of a cloud-based solution. It doesn't matter if you bring more files and documents tomorrow. You won't have to go to the data center and deploy server loads. You just have to pay, and that's the beauty of it.

I'd give Microsoft Purview technical support a rating of seven out of ten because it's tricky to get to the correct department, such as the product support team, for example, when you contact Microsoft Support. I do like that there's user documentation that helps get a lot out of the way, and my experience with Microsoft user documentation is pretty good.

Neutral

Some customers used different setups before using Microsoft Purview, but those were outdated and designed for file sharing and on-premises storage. Now, they are on Microsoft Purview.

Microsoft Purview, as a solution, is set apart by being baked into the Microsoft Stack.

Deploying Microsoft Purview is pretty straightforward, though an organization may have to contact a partner or consultant to assist with deploying the tool because my company doesn't deal with critical business situations. There's a need to ensure that the website is set up proactively, works with the tool, and also covers information on how to address possible issues that could arise in the future.

The deployment itself isn't too tricky and can be done quickly, but you must ensure that the organization has adopted it. It's not merely about deploying Microsoft Purview, and then that's it. You must ensure the proper psychology is there and that you're continuing to scan new data sources if you're buying into a new service. You have to keep the solution up-to-date and also know what to do if a disaster occurs. Microsoft Purview isn't a tool you can just turn off. Each organization goes through a pilot, and my company does a phased approach, such as a pre-production environment. My company shows the customer how the tool works and what it would do in different scenarios and lets the customer practice using Microsoft Purview.

You get ROI from Microsoft Purview because its cost is entirely justified, considering the value it brings back to your organization from the data insights the tool provides. The significant decrease in the percentage of risks, particularly from insider frauds and data loss, whether maliciously or unintentionally, or by accident, helps the organization enjoy ROI from Microsoft Purview.

The solution also helps my company uphold its reputation of abiding by European legislation, such as the GDPR, knowing that the company can keep data secure and that Microsoft Purview can help prevent organizations or companies from being out of business by decreasing data loss and insider fraud risks, so I'd say the ROI can be pretty high from the solution.

Microsoft Purview has reasonable pricing. The solution helps save money, and its cost is justified, at least for the organizations I've worked with. Microsoft Purview has a pay-per-use pricing model, so it's one of the most cost-effective tools, as your cost will be based on your usage. It's a pricing model that Microsoft has nailed down, making it great that whether you're a small organization or a multinational, giant organization, the pricing model for Microsoft Purview works. If you look into the cost of the breach versus the ongoing learning cost over a year or so, the solution's price is more than justified. However, I'm unable to give the exact figure on how much money Microsoft Purview can save an organization, as I'm a consultant who doesn't have precise information.

I don't use Microsoft Purview for data loss protection within the company, but I've seen its use case, so I understand where you would use that feature.

Regarding how Microsoft Purview AI and automation features affected the quality of insights my customers have, it's hard to say currently because there's not much of a benchmark to go off. The AI isn't going to be as accurate as a person who's been in the organization for ten years, for example, who knows the data and types of data the organization has. If you look at the way AI is developing, it's not fair to rate it yet, but if it keeps going in the same trajectory, it will be possible in the not-so-distant future.

Microsoft Purview has a cloud-based deployment on Azure.

The customers I've worked with vary from multinational data organizations with fifty thousand people to organizations with five hundred to less than a thousand people.

In terms of maintenance, my recommendation is to always keep on top of it, such as continuously scanning and being on top of it when building new apps and doing data migrations, but not necessarily in terms of updates. You should ensure encrypting your data as well, but from a maintenance point of view, Microsoft Purview is pretty self-sufficient, but you'd have to monitor it and not forget about it if you want to keep reaping the benefits.

I would recommend Microsoft Purview to others, but my advice is to ensure that the data layer underneath your organization is solid and that you're building a solid foundation. The success of any product or solution is dependent on a good foundation. You also have to ensure that you have the right people, the deployment is based on your industry, and you're meeting the standards, whether setting the solution up within a year or so. It's similar to building a house. Without the proper foundation, you're never going to finish building properly. Issues will crop up, and your home won't be properly aligned. However, if you build it entirely on a concrete, perfectly flat base, then it will be maintained well, and you can go forward with it.

My rating for Microsoft Purview is eight out of ten because it only requires limited improvement, and you won't find another solution better than Microsoft Purview in the market.

I'm a Microsoft consultant involved in the technical enablement of various Microsoft services.

We use it for the text of emails. We use it to keep track of groups as well. We also use it to go through the mailbox of a former employee to retrieve the mailbox for a new employee. We use it for e-discovery and content search in emails across our organization.

We use it internally for just a few use cases. I know there are a lot of connections between it and other Microsoft applications and multiple clouds, but we don't have those use cases currently.

We carry out implementations for customers on these particular solutions. For example, if we're selling a Microsoft 365 solution to them, we use it to secure their data, especially their emails through backup, and SharePoint.

It has improved our ability to retain data and retrieve the data that we need at a future date.

We are also able to see how sensitive data flows across the organization, so it has been very helpful in telling us where that data is originally from and where it is being sent to. We have the ability to track it and control and restrict it from going outside our organization. We've benefited from that a lot.

Purview also enables us to show compliance in real time. We can see what the requirements are and then we can apply them across the organization. That has been very helpful.

It has also helped us to stay updated and make sure that we are not out of compliance. It keeps us updated with any new policies that are required for organizations like ours. That's of great value to us.

Another advantage is that it has definitely reduced the time-to-action on insider threats, although we don't measure that at the moment. But from experience, we can tell how much it is saving us in investigations, compared to before we had the solution.

The most valuable feature is the information protection, the way we're able to retain emails.

Another aspect that is very important is that Purview has been built to take critical regulations from around the world into account. It gives us trust that all of the compliance requirements are being met and that we just have to take care of our data. We don't have to worry about whether the regulations are being met around the infrastructure and we can just focus on our data. It's very important to us to have that level of trust in our systems.

Also, Purview's data loss protection for remediating policy violations is very good. It gives you the opportunity to know your data and apply policies around it. If those policies are flouted, you can always track what's happening. You have options such as alerting the person who is committing that action, or you can take automatic action by blocking, for example, an email that is being sent externally. It's very useful.

I've been using it since as far back as when it was Security and Compliance Center, before there was a separation between compliance and security. That happened around 2019, so I've been using it since 2019.

The stability is great. Like every SaaS application, there are infrastructure issues, maybe once a year. Overall, it's good.

The scalability is also great.

The service level agreement is excellent and the support follow-up is also great. They have good knowledge.

Positive

In terms of ROI, my bosses take care of that calculation, but I know we are getting benefit and value from Purview.

The categorization within the licensing could be improved. There are a lot of solutions within Microsoft Purview. If the licensing could be a bit clearer and the solutions could be better categorized according to function and across multiple environments, that would be excellent. The licensing is very confusing.

The pricing, for the solutions and value being provided, is fair. But that ties back to what I said about the licensing. There are a lot of standalone solutions you can get, and there are different licensing options for them. Depending on what you need, you can have a cost-effective solution; you can figure out your cost and benefit. It's affordable.

We are still exploring whether Purview can help reduce the number of solutions that we have interacting with each other. There are a lot of solutions within Microsoft Purview, but we still have some data that is on-prem and we are still looking at how we can expand and connect to those areas. It's something that is in progress.

In terms of maintenance, it's a SaaS solution, so the applications are automatically updated. There's almost zero maintenance. We do have to take care of configuration and updating preferences. I am able to handle that myself.

My advice is to develop a clear use case and a roadmap, perhaps from a consultant if you don't have the time, or spend some time doing research on it, because there are a lot of great solutions within Microsoft Purview. You need to have a strategy for the way you combine the solutions together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I use their information protection labels. 

Information protection labels help us classify and protect data from unauthorized access.

An organization architect has to design the labels to describe the criticality of the data.

For example, we'd put labels and restrictions on certain data, like salary details, which would only be available to HR and certain managers. 

We can also classify policies based on the organization. Workloads and attachments are labeled so that they can not be shared outside of the classification label. 

Data sensitivity is a crucial issue for everyone, especially with remote and hybrid work. Everything has moved to the cloud in the last five or six years. We need to protect our data and the cloud and we do that with our own managed key to ensure DLP.

The labeling is excellent.

The endpoint DLP is very good. They are doing a lot of enhancements there. The DLP features consist of restricting copy-paste, network sharing, and blocking. We can take actions like blocking and warning with custom messaging to the end users. We are able to effectively reduce the data loss through endpoint DLP. 

We also don't have to pay for third-party DLP solutions. 

The OCR feature is really great. They've been improving it. If there is sensitive information in an image, it can be scanned and protected. 

We can prevent, block, or audit however we like. There are activity explorer audit logs that are available for 90 days. 

The solution can be used across Mac, Android and iOS. The support is there if you use those. MacOS does have some different settings, however, I haven't really explored it too much.

Purview is natively integrated with Azure and 365 workloads. We can classify the Azure Infra as well. 

We're using the solution at a large scale. It's important that Purview takes into account critical integrations from around the world. The labeling will automatically classify data that will cover sensitive data. We can make our own classifications on top of that if we need more security. Once the data classification happens in Purview, we can take an extra step if we like. 

The data loss protection is great for remediating policy violations. We have policies configured via labels. We can check in with individual users to see if there are any malicious activities happening. We're extremely confident no one can take data off-site. Even the labels are encrypted. Even if someone takes the data, it's encrypted and safe. 

DLP comes into the picture when a data classification happens. We have to educate the users that we've classified the data based on sensitivity. We enforce DLP policies by forcing users to use labels. If they do not use labels, they cannot, for example, use files for their day-to-day work. We've imposed classification on them. They cannot share or take data without the proper label or access.

Purview has helped us reduce the number of solutions we need to interact with. This fits perfectly with today's data privacy and security concerns. Corporate devices are completely managed through the support of this solution.

Purview has positively affected the visibility we have into our estate. Once the data is classified, you get a complete 360-degree view of it, including where it is and the labels associated with it. With the content explorer, we have eyes on the entirety of our data as it's hosted on the cloud. 

It helps us ensure compliance in real-time. We don't face any issues right now with compliance. Security and compliance are completely in sync, and we've defined the necessary policies. We're audit-ready.  

The solution has helped us know of any insider threats. It's helped us reduce time to action on insider threats by 40%.

While the product doesn't exactly save us money, it does save us time. It's reduced time spent on security by two to three hours. 

There are some non-Microsoft file formats that are not supported. 

While they seem to be focused on Sharepoint and OneDrive, I'd advise that if somebody saves something locally to their hard drive, this should also be classified and protected. 

The DLP has to become more mature now that there are other competitors present in the market.

While the solution went through a name change two years ago, however, I used the compliance security portal for the last three to four years.

The solution isn't completely stable. It's not mature. I'd rate stability six out of ten. There are bugs and glitches. The product is also evolving. They're always adding new features based on feedback and the experience of the customer. They deploy a ton of fixes. 

We have the solution across multiple locations and departments. We have about 2,200 people in the organization, and around 1,700 people use it. 

The solution isn't completely scalable. They are working on it. 

I'm not sure what happened. However, I've noticed, after getting very good support for the last ten years, that, in the last two, the support level has gotten worse. Their engineers don't know the basics of their products. They need to be more knowledgeable and offer a better response time. 

Negative

We did not use anything previously. 

We did testing and a POC for three months until the rollout. We had three to four people working on it. However, one engineer is sufficient with some guidance from Microsoft. One or two engineers would be enough for a complete deployment.  

The implementation process is straightforward. It's not overly complex. 

There is no maintenance needed. Microsoft supports it; if there is any service interruption, they will cover you.

We have witnessed an ROI. We save on costs and do not need to do too much manual work. We've seen an ROI of 17% to 18%.

If you are an organization using Microsoft 365 solutions, it's okay. If you are on Google Solutions and using Google Cloud, it might be costly. Having the complete Microsoft bundle makes it feasible and cost-effective. 

I've heard that Purview and Forcepoint are similar and very comparable.

We're a Microsoft customer.

If an organization doesn't want to spend money on other solutions in the market, I'd recommend Microsoft. Instead of nothing, you'll have something. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

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

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

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

The data loss protection helps remediate policy violations.

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

It improved our visibility into our environment.

Microsoft Purview helps us show our compliance in real time.

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

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

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for four months.

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

Microsoft Purview is scalable.

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

Neutral

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

I would rate Microsoft Purview seven out of ten.

Maintenance is done by the vendor.

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

Microsoft Purview has several built-in solutions, including data loss prevention, e-discovery, life cycle management, and information protection. It functions as a DLP tool and includes a compliance portal that enables integration with various other solutions to ensure compliance. Therefore, it provides readily available integrations.

The solution deployed as a SaaS.

It is crucial for Microsoft Purview to offer data protection across various cloud platforms because many customers are now utilizing cloud technology. It is not always the case that everyone will use Azure exclusively, as many customers may have multiple cloud vendors. Therefore, it is essential to support multifunctional or multi-vendor flows to meet the needs of these customers.

To ensure proper functionality and data security, we need to accommodate a wide range of operating systems. Therefore, our solution must support multiple vendors or be multi-tenant, allowing us to have visibility over all devices within our network.

It is important that Microsoft Purview is globally compliant. The solution comes with pre-defined rules and policies, providing us with a wide range of capabilities to manage multiple geolocations simultaneously.

Microsoft Purview's data loss protection feature is helpful in remediating policy violations as it provides extensive forensic data. This includes information such as the user, the activity performed, the starting point, and the flow path of the activity. Additionally, the tool has forensic analytics capabilities that enable us to identify and prioritize policy violations effectively.

Educating users on data loss protection can be straightforward. For example, Microsoft's product includes integrated guides on the console. Whether the user is an individual or an administrator, if they are unsure how to use the product, there are supported guides and links available to assist them. This makes the experience easier and ensures that best practices are followed when managing data loss protection.

It was important that Microsoft extended Purview's data loss prevention to Mac OS endpoints because it enables us to manage all devices on our network through a single console.

Microsoft Purview has simplified my work with its effortless deployment.

Microsoft Purview has decreased the need for multiple solutions to communicate with each other. If we were to discuss other DLP solutions, an additional agent would need to be installed. However, Purview utilizes Defender, which enables it to capture data and obtain all necessary information without requiring the deployment of any other agents. Therefore, there is no need for any additional agents to be installed.

The solution provides visibility into the state of our organization by giving us inventory details and maintaining an updated version or list of the inventories that are currently in use. This allows us to have clear visibility of the devices we are using, specifically end devices. It also enables us to easily manage non-active or disconnected devices.

Microsoft Purview enables us to show our compliance in real-time. 

Microsoft Purview includes multiple predefined sets of compliance rules that can be compared to our specific compliance requirements. We can then map these rules to our policies.

The agent saves us the time and effort of manual reporting. When the device is active, the agents also become active and start reporting. The reporting process takes the same amount of time regardless of which policy we use.

Microsoft Purview helps us to maintain compliance by providing a checklist of tasks that need to be completed, along with mapping.

The ease of integration with other Microsoft solutions is the most valuable feature. 

The availability of pre-designed policies tailored to specific geolocations and customer requirements is also a valuable feature.

The Microsoft Purview data connector platform, which supports ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources, can be somewhat complex. For instance, when using Linux or Mac OS, additional agents are required. However, deploying these agents can lead to high resource consumption, such as increased CPU, hard disk, and RAM usage.

The performance has room for improvement. 

I have been using the solution for three months.

Microsoft Purview is a SaaS platform, so its stability is very good.

The scalability is all based on the license. 

The initial setup is straightforward. For our implementation strategy, we began by collecting inventory details. We then identified the supported devices by their operating systems, separating them into Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. For Linux devices, we created software packages offline and deployed them to the IT assistance team. After the agents started reporting on the console, we restarted the Linux devices. For Windows devices, we were able to connect directly. First, we were in the POC phase, testing a few devices and developing the rules and policies, followed by applying the rules to all the devices.

The number of people required for the deployment depends on our infrastructure and the size of our environment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

As a consulting firm, we utilize several Data Loss Prevention solutions such as Symantec DLP, Forcepoint DLP, and Microsoft Purview. Our recommendations to clients are based on their specific needs and financial plan.

Microsoft Purview comprises various solutions, and I recommend acquainting oneself with all of its aspects to make the most of the tool.