As businesses onboard more and more cloud solutions and hire remote employees for a hybrid work environment, their data becomes scattered and fragmented across their organizations. Opting for more people, applications, devices, and locations results in more data coming into an organization, but few businesses have a real plan for what happens to that data when it comes into their environment. The data ends up sitting in siloes as a result.
While that might not sound like a life-or-death situation on its face, it can result in security loopholes, exposure to risk, and even lost data. Governance is the answer to this data fragmentation problem, but it has many moving parts such as risk management and compliance. If you have not yet considered a governance solution for your business, now is the time before your data becomes too scattered to leverage or control. When you’re ready, consider Microsoft Purview.
What Is Microsoft Purview?
Purview is a family of Microsoft products that offer unified data governance, information protection, risk management, and compliance. The product family consists of:
- Audit to help businesses meet regulatory requirements and support investigations.
- Communication Compliance to detect sensitive or inappropriate content potentially being shared across your business’ communication channels.
- Compliance Manager that translates complex regulatory requirements into actions you can take to improve your organization’s compliance and reduce risk.
- Data Lifecycle Management helps you automatically protect sensitive information.
- Data Map and Data Catalog create a unified map to automate and manage metadata from hybrid sources—enabling you to maximize the business value of data for your customers.
- eDiscovery helps you manage your data with workflows for internal or legal investigations.
- Information Protection enables you to discover, identify, classify, and protect sensitive data across your environment.
- Insider Risk Management involves detecting and taking action on critical risks in your business, such as data leaks and security policy violations.
What Do You Get from Microsoft Purview?
The solution provides three essential benefits:
- It allows you to not only govern your data but to understand it. When you can’t use your data, you have “dark data”—or data that goes underutilized in decision making. According to CIO, dark data is growing at a rate of 62 percent per year, meaning many businesses out there are making decisions with only part of the information in their whole picture. With Purview, you get visibility into all your data so you can best manage your assets and make more informed decisions.
- Purview enables you to protect your data no matter the source. You do not have to have data stored in Microsoft platforms to take advantage of the safeguarding capabilities of Purview. From apps to clouds to devices, you can protect all sensitive data.
- By being able to identify risks and better manage regulatory requirements through Purview, you’ll improve your risk and compliance posture. If you are in an industry that has evolving, complicated regulatory standards, Purview is your best bet for maintaining compliance.
You’ll also be able to create a map of your entire data estate through the Purview governance portal that lets you identify where sensitive data is stored in your estate. From there, you can create an secure environment for users to find data and generate insights about how your data is stored and used.
Get Better Data Governance Today
Purview offers the holistic approach to data governance and risk management that the modern business needs. As IT management and security roles blur, hybrid work makes things complicated, and digital transformation signals no end to apps and cloud tools, Purview is the solution of choice. If you’re curious about what Purview can do for your business, get in touch with Point Alliance today. We’d love to learn about your organization and how we can help.
