Microsoft Purview - Data Governance, Security & Compliance

What is Microsoft Purview?

Microsoft Purview is a unified platform for data security, data governance, and compliance. It helps organizations gain visibility into their data across cloud, on-premises, and AI applications, protect it, and manage it in line with regulatory requirements. The solutions are organized into three areas: data security (including Data Loss Prevention, Information Protection, and Insider Risk Management), data governance (Data Map and Unified Catalog), and data compliance (including eDiscovery, Communication Compliance, Records Management, and Compliance Manager).

All capabilities are accessed through the Microsoft Purview portal, which provides a unified interface for governance, security, and compliance tasks. A growing focus area is protecting data related to generative AI, such as Copilot experiences, custom-built AI agents, and other AI applications.

Core Features

Data Map and Unified Catalog: Automatic scanning and cataloging of data sources across Azure, other clouds, and on-premises systems, including data lineage.

Data Loss Prevention and Information Protection: Classification of sensitive data (including via sensitivity labels) and enforcement of protection policies across Microsoft 365, Azure, and third-party apps.

Insider Risk Management: Detection of risky or suspicious activity through analysis of user behavior and data access patterns.

Compliance solutions: eDiscovery, Communication Compliance, Records Management, Audit, and Compliance Manager to support regulatory requirements.

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM): Provides (partly in preview) central visibility and control over data risks in traditional applications as well as in AI apps and agents.

Typical Use Cases

Data discovery and cataloging: Automatic discovery and cataloging of data assets across Azure, other clouds, on-premises databases, SaaS applications, and BI tools for central data transparency.

Protect sensitive data: Automatic classification of sensitive data (PII, financial, health data) and application of protection policies (encryption, DLP) across Microsoft 365, Azure, and third-party apps.

GDPR compliance: Handling data subject requests by identifying personal data across systems and supporting deletion or disclosure workflows.

Protecting AI applications: Securing data processed in Copilot experiences, custom enterprise AI applications, and agents against accidental oversharing or data leakage.

Benefits

• Unified platform for governance, security, and compliance instead of isolated point solutions
• Broad connector coverage for multi-cloud and on-premises data sources
• End-to-end data lineage and classification capabilities
• Growing feature set specifically for protecting data in AI workflows

Frequently Asked Questions about Microsoft Purview

What is Microsoft Purview?

Microsoft Purview is a platform that bundles data governance, data security, and compliance solutions to provide visibility into, protect, and govern enterprise data across cloud, on-premises, and AI applications.

When should you use Microsoft Purview?

Purview is suited for organizations that want to build a central data catalog, classify and protect sensitive data, meet compliance requirements (such as GDPR), or manage data risks related to generative AI.

What does Microsoft Purview cost?

Data governance features are mostly billed on a consumption basis (capacity units for the Data Map, data governance processing units for compute-heavy tasks such as data quality). Many compliance and security features are part of Microsoft 365 licenses (e.g., E5) or are licensed separately. Current pricing details are available on the official pricing page.

Which data sources does Purview support?

Purview supports a wide range of data sources, including Azure services (Storage, SQL, Synapse, Data Lake), other clouds, on-premises databases, and numerous SaaS applications. The exact list of supported connectors is continuously expanded and listed in the official documentation.

Does Purview support data lineage?

Yes, through the Data Map, Purview creates lineage information showing how data flows from sources through transformations to reports and dashboards.

Can Purview integrate with existing DLP solutions?

Purview offers native data loss prevention for Microsoft 365, Teams, Exchange, and SharePoint, and can be integrated into existing security and compliance processes via APIs and connectors.

Alternatives

alternatives:

• provider: “aws” product: “data-zone”
• provider: “gcp” product: “dataplex”

Integration with innFactory

As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, innFactory supports you in implementing Microsoft Purview for data governance, data security, and compliance. We help with data cataloging, classification strategies, GDPR compliance, and integration into existing systems.

Contact us for a non-binding consultation on Microsoft Purview.