What is Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager?
Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager is a solution that helps you automatically assess and manage compliance across your multicloud environment. It supports the entire compliance journey: from taking inventory of your data protection risks to managing the complexities of implementing controls, staying current with regulations and certifications, and reporting to auditors.
Compliance Manager reduces effort and risk through four building blocks: pre-built assessments for common industry and regional standards or custom assessments, workflow capabilities to complete risk assessments in a single tool, detailed step-by-step guidance on suggested improvement actions, and a risk-based compliance score. Compliance Manager is part of Microsoft Purview; for an overview of the whole platform, see our page on Microsoft Purview.
Core Features
Assessments: An assessment groups controls from a regulation, standard or policy. It contains the in-scope services, Microsoft managed controls, your controls, shared controls and an assessment score.
Over 360 regulatory templates: Assessments can be created quickly from existing templates, and custom templates are available for unique needs.
Improvement actions: Each action provides recommended guidance intended to help you align with data protection regulations and standards. Actions can be assigned to users, hold evidence and notes, and record status updates.
Compliance score: Points for completed actions feed into an overall score weighted by risk, which helps with prioritization.
Transparency about Microsoft’s responsibility: For actions managed by Microsoft, implementation details and audit results are shown.
Typical Use Cases
Preparing for certifications: An assessment brings together the requirements of a standard, for example bringing Microsoft 365 settings in line with ISO 27001 requirements.
Distributed ownership: Improvement actions are assigned to responsible people who document implementation and testing.
Evidence for audits: Evidence, notes and status updates are stored directly with the action.
Prioritizing work: The risk-based score shows which action improves your compliance posture the most.
Benefits
- Automated compliance assessment across multicloud environments
- A large library of regulatory templates plus the option of custom templates
- Clear separation between Microsoft, customer and shared responsibility
- Central storage of evidence, notes and status per action
- Risk-based prioritization through a transparent compliance score
Integration with innFactory
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, innFactory supports you in adopting Purview Compliance Manager: selecting suitable assessments and templates, assigning and tracking improvement actions, building evidence documentation, and connecting it to your existing compliance processes.
Contact us for a no-obligation consultation on compliance management with Microsoft Purview.
Typical Use Cases
Technical Specifications
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager?
Compliance Manager is a solution that helps you automatically assess and manage compliance across your multicloud environment. It supports the whole compliance journey, from taking inventory of data protection risks to implementing controls, staying current with regulations and certifications, and reporting to auditors. Compliance Manager is part of Microsoft Purview; for an overview of the whole platform see our page on [Microsoft Purview](/en/cloud/azure/products/purview/).
How is the compliance score calculated?
Compliance Manager awards points for completing improvement actions and combines those points into an overall compliance score. Each action has a different impact depending on the potential risks involved. The initial score is based on the Microsoft 365 data protection baseline, a set of controls that includes key regulations and standards for data protection and general data governance.
What is a control?
A control is a requirement of a regulation, standard or policy. It defines how you assess and manage system configuration, organizational process and the people responsible for meeting that requirement. Compliance Manager tracks Microsoft managed controls, customer managed controls and shared controls.
What is an assessment?
An assessment is a grouping of controls from a specific regulation, standard or policy. Completing the actions within an assessment helps you meet its requirements. An assessment includes in-scope services, the three control types and an assessment score showing your progress toward the total possible points.
How many regulatory templates are available?
Compliance Manager provides over 360 regulatory templates to help you quickly create assessments. For unique compliance needs, you can also create custom regulation templates.
Is Compliance Manager available in German?
Yes. Microsoft lists German among the supported languages; in total the interface is available in 25 languages.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of Azure (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by Azure.
