Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview is a comprehensive data governance and compliance platform designed to help organizations discover, classify, protect, and govern sensitive information across their entire data landscape. The platform serves as a centralized hub for managing data security and compliance requirements in modern enterprise environments.

At its core, Purview provides a unified data catalog and discovery system that functions as an intelligent inventory of all organizational data assets—including databases, reports, files, dashboards, and cloud-based data sources. The platform automatically scans environments and builds a comprehensive data map, enabling departments to identify what data already exists and understand its meaning. This centralized visibility helps prevent duplicate efforts and improves data asset management across the organization.

The platform incorporates advanced data classification and sensitivity labeling capabilities that automatically detect and categorize sensitive information. These classifications work seamlessly across Microsoft 365 services, including SharePoint, Teams, and email, as well as Azure data repositories. Organizations can apply sensitivity labels to documents and reports, with protections such as encryption and restricted sharing automatically enforced regardless of whether files are exported to formats like Excel or PDF.

Data quality management is another essential feature, offering AI-powered data profiling that provides statistical snapshots of datasets, including distribution, completeness, uniqueness, and consistency metrics. Organizations can define custom data quality rules based on industry standards—completeness, consistency, conformity, accuracy, freshness, and uniqueness—and schedule automated quality scans at regular intervals. When quality issues are detected, the platform generates actionable alerts that can be assigned to specific team members for resolution, while maintaining a complete audit trail of corrective actions.

Purview streamlines data access through governed self-service capabilities, allowing employees to discover datasets and request access through a centralized, compliant process. Organizations can define data access policies at the business domain or glossary-term level, with automatic enforcement of requirements such as approval workflows and permission restrictions.

The platform strengthens compliance and security operations through comprehensive auditing and monitoring features. All activities—including email communications, file access, label changes, and policy overrides—are captured in a unified audit log that administrators and investigators can search to support forensic investigations, compliance obligations, and security incident response. For organizations handling legal proceedings, the platform includes eDiscovery tools that enable identification and secure delivery of electronic information as evidence.

Microsoft Purview also provides specialized capabilities for managing insider risk and communication compliance, offering features that help organizations detect and respond to behavioral risks while maintaining detailed records for compliance purposes. The platform integrates with Azure Active Directory Conditional Access to enforce context-aware policies based on device trust or geographic location, adding an additional layer of access control.

For organizations deploying artificial intelligence tools, Purview extends governance capabilities to AI interactions through Data Security Posture Management for AI (DSPM for AI). This functionality captures AI prompts and responses in audit logs, applies data loss prevention policies to prevent sensitive data exposure in AI applications, and enables compliance monitoring of AI system usage. Developers can integrate Purview capabilities into custom applications through the Microsoft Purview API, allowing organizations to build policy-aware applications that respect organizational data controls and compliance requirements.

The platform's unified approach to governance brings together data classification, quality management, access control, audit logging, and compliance monitoring under one framework, reducing complexity and enabling organizations to maintain consistent data handling practices across their entire technology environment.

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Website: microsoft.com

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