Purview, specifically Microsoft Purview, is primarily used as a comprehensive suite of solutions designed to help organizations govern, protect, and manage their data across various environments, ensuring compliance with regulations and mitigating risks. It serves as a unified platform for data governance, data security, and risk and compliance management.
Understanding Purview's Core Function
At its heart, Purview provides tools and capabilities that empower businesses to gain visibility into their data landscape, understand where sensitive information resides, and implement policies to safeguard it. This includes addressing challenges such as data sprawl, increasing regulatory demands, and the growing threat of cyberattacks and insider risks.
Key Capabilities and Solutions
Microsoft Purview offers a robust suite of data security and governance solutions, each serving a critical purpose in maintaining a secure and compliant data environment. These include:
- Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP): This capability helps organizations prevent sensitive information from being inappropriately shared, transferred, or used. It identifies, monitors, and automatically protects sensitive items across various locations like Microsoft 365 services, endpoints, and non-Microsoft cloud apps.
- Information Barriers: Designed for highly regulated industries, Information Barriers allow organizations to define policies that restrict communication and collaboration between specific user groups. This helps avoid conflicts of interest and ensures compliance with legal or ethical requirements.
- Information Protection: This feature enables organizations to discover, classify, label, and protect sensitive data wherever it lives or travels. It applies encryption, access restrictions, and visual markings to ensure only authorized individuals can access sensitive information.
- Insider Risk Management: Purview's Insider Risk Management tools help organizations identify, analyze, and act on risky activities by users that could lead to data breaches, intellectual property theft, or other security incidents. It uses machine learning to detect anomalous behavior.
- Privileged Access Management: This solution provides granular control over access to highly sensitive data and critical resources. It helps limit the risks associated with elevated access by implementing just-in-time and just-enough access, ensuring that privileged credentials are used only when necessary and for a limited duration.
Why is Purview Important?
In today's complex digital landscape, where data is decentralized and regulations are stringent, Purview plays a crucial role by offering:
- Unified Data Governance: Providing a holistic view of data assets across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
- Enhanced Data Security: Protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access, loss, and misuse.
- Regulatory Compliance: Helping organizations meet various compliance standards like GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and more.
- Risk Mitigation: Identifying and addressing potential data-related risks proactively, including insider threats.
By leveraging Purview, organizations can establish a strong foundation for managing their data lifecycle from creation to deletion, ensuring it remains secure and compliant throughout. For more detailed information, you can refer to official resources such as Microsoft's documentation on Purview.
