Microsoft Purview Data Governance Reviews

I see many customers these days looking into Microsoft Purview syntax and mainly using the solution for data lineage and data governance. The customer wants to be able to understand data a bit more within the organization and be able to classify and protect sensitive data and understand what it is. 

My company works with the healthcare and financial sectors.

Microsoft Purview can give good information on the cause of the breach, and that comes into the forefront of many organizations nowadays to know how to protect data not only from external sources but also internally as well.

Much of the feedback I get from customers on how Microsoft Purview improves organizations is around the visibility factor at the end of the day. It's all about protecting data and ensuring you don't lose data externally and internally.

Many customers also say that Microsoft Purview also helps simplify the management of data governance policies, as it gives you visibility, automation, and authentication. For example, you can now see classifications whether your documents meet specific criteria or not, through Microsoft Purview.

From my experience and customer feedback, one of the most valuable features of Microsoft Purview is ease of use, especially for content hosted within Microsoft 365 and Azure. You can connect Microsoft Purview to different sources.

I also like that the pricing model for the solution is reasonable, though that would depend on how much you use. That makes it much easier for people to have that initial setup, get started, and see all of the information straight away. If you want a more complex Microsoft Purview setup, you may have to contact a consultant for more technical aspects to enable the solution. Still, one of the most significant selling points for me is the setup, including the automation experience.

Microsoft Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multiple-platform environments, including AWS and GCP, which I find very important because if you look at the percentage of customers that have multiple automated channels or multiple-platform setups, it's very, very high, primarily because customers don't put eggs in one basket.

It's also essential for me that Microsoft Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices, including other SaaS apps, as I spend quite a lot of my time using my iPhone and iPad, whether for a webinar at the end of the day while I'm preparing dinner, and that's still the same information on my company laptop or desktop, which means I still need to ensure that the data I access is still very secure. 

Though you can protect yourself with multifactor authentication, people find ways to get past that, so you have to ensure that even if someone's getting into your organization now, the location within is siloed, and you could see the different classification levels that could easily be applied, making it more difficult for that person to get what he needs easily, compared to SharePoint that's open to everyone, making it a walk in the park, so what Microsoft Purview is able to provide is very important in this hybrid age.

I find Microsoft Purview very important in its natively integrated compliance across Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365, as you'll have sensitive content stored these days, especially if you're an organization with a lot of customer data in your database. Microsoft Purview helps secure customer records and also has a data loss prevention feature, plus data governance and compliance features that I find very important for organizations.

Microsoft Purview has also helped reduce the number of solutions my company needed. The solution is part of the project Microsoft has rapidly been developing, and over the years, the components of the Microsoft services went through a confusing renaming cycle. There were a lot of different services, but I've found out how each should be used, such as for security and compliance, some complementing technologies for identification, classification, traffic, and AI, for example, that I'm continuing to evaluate. At first, there was a bit of confusion, but now it all makes sense.

The simplicity of the number of solutions made data governance a lot easier. With Microsoft Purview, you won't have to interact with a substantial amount of systems, and I'm a firm believer that more risk could arise when you introduce more complexity into a solution or system you're developing. The services you make use of could sometimes deprecate and change features. Hence, having compliance, governance, automation, and data discovery features in one solution, such as Microsoft Purview, makes my life and the customer's life easier.

A key feature of Microsoft Purview for me is that it was built while considering critical regulations worldwide. My company works with organizations where there's usually a requirement for compliance, such as GDPR. I also work with many Germany-based customers that require GWC compliance, and there's strictness with the way data is stored and classified. You must advise and know all regulations, which Microsoft Purview enables you to do. For example, if you look at the amount of data in terms of size, such as the terabytes being housed in various websites, there's no way you could get the information without Microsoft Purview. There's too much data within organizations now, and all it takes is a tiny percentage of that data to be shared in the wrong way or be leaked, which could incur substantial fines, so Microsoft Purview is a product that justifies itself in that very premise.

Microsoft Purview has also enabled visibility, giving customers an overview of how much data is compliant. The solution also provides visibility into the quality of data, movement, and performance, so visibility is another valuable feature of Microsoft Purview.

My company uses the AI and automation features of Microsoft Purview, which I find very critical within the solution. The speed and accuracy of risk detection improved with  AI and automation features because classifying data is easier now, giving me a headstart. The AI can do essential, light work, going around all of the various containers within the organization, so the team only does twenty percent of the work now, such as management, reviews, and reports.

Microsoft Purview AI and automation make it less admin-intensive from a data protection and compliance point of view. If you look into a role within an organization, for example, I'm a DPO, which is a relatively new role. With Microsoft Purview, you'd only need one to two people full-time, another key benefit of the solution. The rest of the work would continue to fall on the shoulders of the IT team, which is stretched in organizations today.

The solution enables you to show real-time compliance. Microsoft Purview gives you the necessary data because it ties into the compliance scores when you eliminate instances. Right now, there are a lot of backlog reports in terms of compliance on static IPs, data leakage, lineage, and backup.

Real-time compliance data provided by Microsoft Purview has helped organizations, especially in terms of meeting with compliance regulators. I helped organizations with technical enablement, mainly stakeholders who requested assistance, and the reporting in Microsoft Purview has taken so much responsibility from the hands of stakeholders. The solution has better reporting that has broken down data for organizations, giving headlines and figures you usually won't easily catch, which makes successful deployment a lot easier.

Microsoft Purview has also helped reduce the time to action on insider threats, whether fraud or rest protection. Organizations, especially huge financial organizations, are bothered by threats, and Microsoft Purview has been beneficial. In terms of how much the solution reduced the time to action on insider threats, based on all industries I've worked with, it's twenty to twenty-five percent. I'm basing this figure on the fact that the automation from Microsoft Purview is very powerful, and the solution gives accurate protection. If you get an alert from Microsoft Purview, it's usually for valid reasons.

Overall, Microsoft Purview has affected the ability of customers or organizations to stay on top of compliance. You see many good products in the market, but if you have a customer  mainly using Microsoft products, such as Dynamics 365, CRM, etc., and the customer belongs to the financial industry or the public sector, for example, that's dealing with information, it's a no-brainer to have Microsoft Purview in the organization.

One drawback of Microsoft Purview, though it's beneficial and easy to use, is that when you start plugging in connectors for third-party sources when setting the solution up for data collection, it becomes a bit more tricky. There's limited documentation, so it's not as intuitive as setting up other parts of Microsoft Purview. If the process of connecting with third-party cloud providers and other SaaS products could be simplified, that would make Microsoft Purview a better product.

In terms of how Microsoft Purview supports ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources, from a user experience point of view, it's a bit more challenging and results in a bit more struggle in that area. Overall, it's decent, but it would benefit customers if Microsoft spent more time and energy improving that experience and getting it on par with other Microsoft products. Microsoft could make it a lot easier to build connections with other cloud vendors, such as AWS and GCS. Microsoft will get there eventually, but it needs to understand its customer base and look at the percentage.

I've been using Microsoft Purview for a year and a half, particularly getting up to speed with the current version. However, Microsoft had different iterations of the solution that my company used in the past two years.

Microsoft Purview is a very stable solution.

Microsoft Purview is a scalable solution, and that's the beauty of a cloud-based solution. It doesn't matter if you bring more files and documents tomorrow. You won't have to go to the data center and deploy server loads. You just have to pay, and that's the beauty of it.

I'd give Microsoft Purview technical support a rating of seven out of ten because it's tricky to get to the correct department, such as the product support team, for example, when you contact Microsoft Support. I do like that there's user documentation that helps get a lot out of the way, and my experience with Microsoft user documentation is pretty good.

Neutral

Some customers used different setups before using Microsoft Purview, but those were outdated and designed for file sharing and on-premises storage. Now, they are on Microsoft Purview.

Microsoft Purview, as a solution, is set apart by being baked into the Microsoft Stack.

Deploying Microsoft Purview is pretty straightforward, though an organization may have to contact a partner or consultant to assist with deploying the tool because my company doesn't deal with critical business situations. There's a need to ensure that the website is set up proactively, works with the tool, and also covers information on how to address possible issues that could arise in the future.

The deployment itself isn't too tricky and can be done quickly, but you must ensure that the organization has adopted it. It's not merely about deploying Microsoft Purview, and then that's it. You must ensure the proper psychology is there and that you're continuing to scan new data sources if you're buying into a new service. You have to keep the solution up-to-date and also know what to do if a disaster occurs. Microsoft Purview isn't a tool you can just turn off. Each organization goes through a pilot, and my company does a phased approach, such as a pre-production environment. My company shows the customer how the tool works and what it would do in different scenarios and lets the customer practice using Microsoft Purview.

You get ROI from Microsoft Purview because its cost is entirely justified, considering the value it brings back to your organization from the data insights the tool provides. The significant decrease in the percentage of risks, particularly from insider frauds and data loss, whether maliciously or unintentionally, or by accident, helps the organization enjoy ROI from Microsoft Purview.

The solution also helps my company uphold its reputation of abiding by European legislation, such as the GDPR, knowing that the company can keep data secure and that Microsoft Purview can help prevent organizations or companies from being out of business by decreasing data loss and insider fraud risks, so I'd say the ROI can be pretty high from the solution.

Microsoft Purview has reasonable pricing. The solution helps save money, and its cost is justified, at least for the organizations I've worked with. Microsoft Purview has a pay-per-use pricing model, so it's one of the most cost-effective tools, as your cost will be based on your usage. It's a pricing model that Microsoft has nailed down, making it great that whether you're a small organization or a multinational, giant organization, the pricing model for Microsoft Purview works. If you look into the cost of the breach versus the ongoing learning cost over a year or so, the solution's price is more than justified. However, I'm unable to give the exact figure on how much money Microsoft Purview can save an organization, as I'm a consultant who doesn't have precise information.

I don't use Microsoft Purview for data loss protection within the company, but I've seen its use case, so I understand where you would use that feature.

Regarding how Microsoft Purview AI and automation features affected the quality of insights my customers have, it's hard to say currently because there's not much of a benchmark to go off. The AI isn't going to be as accurate as a person who's been in the organization for ten years, for example, who knows the data and types of data the organization has. If you look at the way AI is developing, it's not fair to rate it yet, but if it keeps going in the same trajectory, it will be possible in the not-so-distant future.

Microsoft Purview has a cloud-based deployment on Azure.

The customers I've worked with vary from multinational data organizations with fifty thousand people to organizations with five hundred to less than a thousand people.

In terms of maintenance, my recommendation is to always keep on top of it, such as continuously scanning and being on top of it when building new apps and doing data migrations, but not necessarily in terms of updates. You should ensure encrypting your data as well, but from a maintenance point of view, Microsoft Purview is pretty self-sufficient, but you'd have to monitor it and not forget about it if you want to keep reaping the benefits.

I would recommend Microsoft Purview to others, but my advice is to ensure that the data layer underneath your organization is solid and that you're building a solid foundation. The success of any product or solution is dependent on a good foundation. You also have to ensure that you have the right people, the deployment is based on your industry, and you're meeting the standards, whether setting the solution up within a year or so. It's similar to building a house. Without the proper foundation, you're never going to finish building properly. Issues will crop up, and your home won't be properly aligned. However, if you build it entirely on a concrete, perfectly flat base, then it will be maintained well, and you can go forward with it.

My rating for Microsoft Purview is eight out of ten because it only requires limited improvement, and you won't find another solution better than Microsoft Purview in the market.

I'm a Microsoft consultant involved in the technical enablement of various Microsoft services.

We use the platform to comply with regulations, and our specific use cases are information protection, information governance, data loss prevention, and insider risk mitigation.

The information protection and data loss prevention functions help our end users be fully aware of the sensitivity of certain information. From a management and CISO perspective, they have insight into where sensitive data is stored and whether we are required by law to delete it after a certain period. That's an invaluable overview of the situation, so our users are more aware, and Purview took our information governance to the next level. It also supports our certifications because it helps us comply with regulations, including ISO/IEC 27001, which are essential to our functioning.

The solution increased visibility into our estate; we had a problem with GDPR-related personal information stored in our environment, which we didn't have any insight into. When we used some of Purview's data governance, data lifecycle management, and content search features, we could rapidly go after that information and resolve compliance issues. The tool also provides management with much better oversight of our stored data.  

Purview enables us to show our compliance in real-time and supports it via the compliance manager and compliance score. The assessment templates within the latter allow us to provide an overview of what we have done within the Microsoft 365 and Dynamics environments to our auditors, which is very handy. We're an ISO-certified company, amongst others. In meetings with compliance regulators, we can show that we're using information protection, DLP, data governance, and data lifecycle management functions to comply with regulations fully. The solution dramatically speeds up the process of talking with external auditors. 

Purview saves us time and money. We're an information-intensive organization; seeing where our sensitive information is stored is a significant time-saver. In addition, showing we're safeguarding that data also saves us a great deal of time. From an efficiency standpoint, AI and auto-classification of information is another big time-saver, as the staff members working for our clients don't want to spend time considering how long data needs to be stored, whether it should be archived, how sensitive it is and so on. I can't quantify exactly how much, but all of the above reasons save us a significant amount of time and money.

The data classification part of the solution is excellent, especially as it gives us an insight into our sensitive data within Microsoft 365. 

Data loss prevention is an extremely useful feature. 

The built-in information protection function is another that stands out. 

Purview delivering data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, including AWS and GCP, is becoming increasingly important. It's a relatively new functionality, and I see the importance of it growing even more over the coming years. This kind of functionality is highly appreciated for organizations operating a multi-cloud environment. 

It's very important to us that Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices and data in other SaaS apps. From information protection and data loss prevention perspectives, information is accessed using many different devices, and extending that protection to iOS and Android is a must-have for any platform.   

The product's natively integrated compliance across Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365 is essential. The ability to classify information across workloads, and have a holistic view over our entire data estate where sensitive information is stored and handled, is excellent, especially from a CISO perspective. This is a capability we didn't previously have. Having that overview of where data is stored, plus the multi-platform/multi-cloud approach is the future for data classification and information protection. Wherever our data is stored, we have an overview of which is sensitive and which isn't. 

I greatly appreciate that Purview was built considering critical regulations worldwide, especially the international standards within the compliance manager. There are ISO and NIST standards, ideal for larger countries such as the USA and extensive international organizations.  

We use Purview for data loss prevention (DLP), and we're confident that we can detect and remediate policy violations. Microsoft improved its solution with recent additions, including advanced conditions, and the product is coming of age. The DLP is reaching a maturity level where we can confidently compare it with competitors like Symantec. It goes beyond DLP on emails, documents, on-premise, and endpoints; governmental organizations especially need to detect if sensitive information is being handled on devices. In this respect, Purview offers comprehensive protection.  

Used correctly, Purview is essential in staying on top of compliance. One of the best features in this regard is the solution's compliance manager, which helps us effectively comply with all the regulations. Many organizations should start using the platform because it will keep them on top of their compliance stances, and Microsoft periodically updates the assessments. We must be aware of updates and changes, as we can miss them if we do not pay attention. We can't just run the solution, walk away, and think we're compliant; it requires some monitoring of the developments from a roadmap perspective.   

Microsoft is doing an excellent job improving the platform, and they have a lot coming out shortly. However, the licensing around compliance could be much more transparent; it isn't clear for many organizations what kind of license they need to use, whether that's E5, E5 compliance, an information protection license, user-based, or platform-based. More information here would be a welcome improvement.

Blueprints and landing zones like we have in Azure would be great to see in Purview. The solution could offer a baseline or blueprint of recommended settings for compliance regulations such as GDPR and ISO, which could be applied with a simple switch in the options. 

Some dashboard centralization, like one overview dashboard instead of many loosely connected ones, could be a good improvement.

We must build our own assessments to comply with Dutch regulations, a mix of international and EU standards, as they aren't native to the solution. Many of our clients in the Netherlands require adherence to Dutch regulations, and as well as Purview covers the international aspect, the Dutch side is covered less than we would like.

There's room for improvement regarding Purview's data loss prevention for educating users on how best to handle sensitive data. Microsoft is working on improving the policy tips. Still, from a user's perspective, I want to see more information in the case of a policy violation, such as context or details on why a specific rule is triggered. There are ways to tweak the DLP options, but a significant improvement would be real-time notifications when working on an email or message within Teams, for example. DLP is only triggered when sending or saving, so real-time notifications would be great. The basic functionality is there, but there's room for improvement. 

We've been using Purview for around a year since Microsoft changed the name, but we've used the functionality within Purview for five to ten years.

We haven't had much experience with customer support as we didn't encounter many problems. However, the response is usually rapid, and the expertise depends on the technical knowledge of the agent we speak to.

Neutral

We didn't use different solutions, but some of our clients did and still do, mostly DLP and data classification platforms. The trend is that more have been moving to Purview because many are already paying for it within their licenses and not using it. We're an IT company focusing on Microsoft technology, so we went straight for Purview.

My colleague carried out the initial setup, and I'm primarily involved in deploying the solution's functions to our clients. Setup requires some planning, a discussion with the stakeholders, and a good sense of the data, but it's mostly very straightforward from an admin's perspective.

Our use case is mainly to do with GDPR-related data, and being able to get an overview of that information and act on it led to a speedy return on investment for us. Other organizations in the Netherlands bound by specific government regulations will also see a quick return on their investment when they discover they can classify their information and comply with regulations.

Aside from the complexity of the pricing model, the price itself is realistic. Features like AI components and automatic classification require additional licenses. Still, anyone can start using Purview with a basic E3 license if they're using Microsoft 365 and grow with additional licenses as needed. Overall, we're satisfied with the price.

With the way information is being used and the growth of data, the need for additional licenses for auto-classification etc., will become more and more apparent. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft incorporated those into the basic license in the future.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Regarding Purview's data connector platform for supporting ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources, I have yet to work with it much. In highly regulated environments such as government organizations, it's very relevant, but I have yet to see it used much. The main reason is that the data connector platform is a relatively unknown component within the solution. It has its merits, but the use cases are limited.

If this were a year ago, I would have said the solution is getting there but hasn't reached maturity. However, Purview is now a very comprehensive solution; with all the enhancements, it's one of the best products available.

As Purview reached a maturity level where it could compete with third-party DLP solutions, some of our clients were able to move away from specific endpoint DLP products like Symantec DLP. Going with Purview also allowed these clients to fully leverage their existing licenses within Microsoft 365 and simplify their data governance. It provides a holistic view of the data estate, enables Defender for Cloud in Azure, and offers an integrated overview in one pane of glass.

Regarding automation, we use some limited functions using the solution's trainable classifiers and auto-classification of information. This notifies the user when working with certain kinds of sensitive data, GDPR and otherwise, so we use some basic AI functions within the platform.  

We're not currently using the product for insider risk management. Still, we are in the process of looking into implementing those features and how we could leverage them within our environment.

We need to catalog and assign terminology to all of our data to find all the personal information that we have within our copy systems.

Over the last three years or so, we have been using Kafka and nesting queues a lot. We wanted to bring in an orchestration engine to integrate seamlessly with our nesting system. We had a lot of legacy applications that are not that old, and we did not want to rewrite software components that we own to get the benefits of orchestration. That's where there is a need. One of the factors that will decide if the use of Camunda will spread out to more use cases in our company is the ease of integration.

We weren't sure what our data was in certain areas. We created red Xs that basically indicated the kinds of codes and criteria we are looking for. Purview uses them to scan, and then it tells us what it has found and where that data may lie within our servers and databases. Now, people in our company have a good understanding, when they look at a database, of what data is in that database.

It has dramatically improved the visibility we have into our environment. That's the main concept of Purview, to show you what data you have. The solution has been magnificent due to the fact that now we know, when we scan the data set, what we have within the database.

One of the compliance criteria in the UK is to make sure you know where all your personal information is, and Purview gives us the ability to know that across our data estate. When we have meetings with compliance regulators it's great because we can demonstrate where our data is. There are no awkward questions because we can say, "This is where our data is." We know it's accurate and it's one version of the truth. Everyone understands that, which is fantastic.

As a result, it has definitely saved us time because when we have requirements meetings they try to establish where the data is. But with the cataloging ability of the tool, we know where all the data is. We don't need to spend five hours finding out where all the data is because we already know. We've already got a scan and it's already told us, and we have verified that. Now we can use that as a blueprint to go forward.

Purview gives us the ability to find out what data we hold, and in which tables, so we can understand and have one version of the truth in every database server system.

The cataloging tool is definitely the most valuable. To catalog data you can have Purview do a scan that you configure yourself. It goes through all of your data in the database server you're connected to and will say there is "date of birth" in this column and personal information in that column, and names in this other column. It tells you about all the data you have in your tables, which helps people understand our data. We now know what data we have.

It's also very important that the solution provides data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments. Purview has links to all of our data so that we can make sure we have the right data protection involved.

Also, because it's very important to make sure that we have everything in place, and we only deal with companies that have all their compliance and rules in place, the fact Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world is essential for our company, when it comes to scanning data.

Purview's data connector platform for non-Microsoft data sources is good, but there is some functionality that hasn't been developed yet. There are some servers that it can't connect to yet, because they're still in a trial process. However, there are obviously some non-MS sources it can support, which is good. Hopefully, for the ones it can't connect to, that will be rolled out soon.

There are other things that need to be developed in Purview. The data retention isn't great at the moment, and in that area we need certain functionality to be built. However, it's a very good tool and one I would champion.

I've been using Microsoft Purview for the last two years.

It hasn't gone wrong yet, so I can only give the stability a 10 out of 10. There have been no issues so far.

There should be no issue rolling it out, going forward. It's already working on seven or eight systems at the moment. However, we expect it will be on a lot more.

We have had a lot of contact with their technical support. Because we're at a very early stage with Purview, we need to make sure that we understand the functionality. They've been fantastic, mainly their support in America. They've been great. There have been no issues and it's very straightforward to understand what they're saying.

Positive

We previously used IBM InfoSphere. That tool wasn't good enough for what we needed.

The setup was pretty straightforward. We worked with our data engineer and it was sorted straight away. It was deployed very easily, in part because it's cloud-based. We had two or three people involved who work in data engineering, architecture, and data governance.

It's deployed across cloud and on-prem solutions. The maintenance is not heavy. It's very straightforward.

It was all done in-house.

We have seen ROI massively. We now know where all our data is, so we don't need to worry about that. The amount of time that it would have taken to do that manually, without a tool like this, would have been huge. It was done automatically with the scan.

The pricing is absolutely excellent, fantastic. And the licensing is also fantastic. You pay for what you use, and the license isn't massive, unlike a lot of other licenses.

We used the review sites to look at all the other technology, and it came up that Purview was the most cost-effective tool to do what we wanted. It wasn't just the cost, but rather, the cost and the functionality. What we wanted was the right price. We found that other tools could do very similar things for a lot more money. While the cost of Purview is very good, the functionality is also very good.

Make sure you have all the details of your endpoints in place because Purview needs to link to the endpoints. If you haven't got the endpoints in place, then you can't make the connection to the servers and to the databases. But if you have all those details in hand, it's very simple and straightforward.

Regardless of our use case, it's important that Purview helps protect iOS, Mac, Android, and data in other SaaS apps. But we use it to catalog our on-prem and our cloud so for us, it's not necessary that it covers iPhone or iOS or Mac. It's more of a system-architecture scanner.

And because it's a cataloging tool for us, we still need our existing systems in place. Purview is like a layer on top of that to find out where we have things and where we need things.

It's a cloud-based system, but it doesn't have any relation to Office or other Microsoft systems. It can link up to anything.

The only reason I'm not going to give it a 10 overall is that not all the functionality has been rolled out yet. Purview is very early on as a tool.

Overall, Purview is a fantastic tool for staying on top of compliance, knowing where your data is and what data you hold. In terms of data retention, you know what data is where and how long it's been there for. It really helps the business to understand that.

We are using Microsoft Purview for Azure Information Protection and DLP to create automatic labeling and policies for sensitive labels. We are also using Insider Risk Management, Communication Compliance, and Records Management for our client.

Microsoft Purview provides data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, which is essential. Some of our clients require these measures because their systems must be secure and their data must be protected from loss for auditing purposes. Therefore, the client is requesting that we enable all of these features for the system.

It is important that Microsoft Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world.

The data loss protection helps remediate policy violations.

Data loss protection helps educate users on how to handle sensitive data.

It improved our visibility into our environment.

Microsoft Purview helps us show our compliance in real time.

Microsoft Purview helps reduce our time to action against threats. It takes some time for the initial configuration, but it detects as soon as the configuration is enabled.

Microsoft Purview integrations with non-Microsoft products have room for improvement.

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for four months.

Microsoft Purview is generally stable, but some of our clients occasionally experience accessibility issues when connecting to the cloud.

Microsoft Purview is scalable.

From a technical support standpoint, I have raised many tickets to date. Within this format, I have raised more than fifteen tickets for various purposes. I feel that few technical team members have a good understanding of the problems we are trying to explain. The rest of them waste our time. Typically, they say they will get back to us after two or three days, but then they come back to the same place they left off. Only a few technical team members are knowledgeable about Microsoft Purview. We still have tickets that are open to this date.

Neutral

The price is reasonable because most of our clients already have an E3 license, which makes implementation easy. For other clients who do not have an E3 license, the cost is higher because they must purchase the package.

I would rate Microsoft Purview seven out of ten.

Maintenance is done by the vendor.

I recommend Microsoft Purview for organizations with an existing E3 license, rather than spending money on a third-party DLP.

I have mostly used Purview for the Content search. For example, if our CEO wants to look into whether a certain type of conversation is taking place in all of the data, we use the Content search. 

The second most common scenario for which I use Purview is endpoint DLP, where we have blocked USBs and different browsers and implemented other endpoint policies.

There is also a new feature that we are trying to use, the Privacy Risk Management, where we are trying to upload the fingerprint data of our users to use it on our endpoint devices. We are replacing Windows 11 for Business.

Purview is becoming the new one-stop solution. It gives you a clearer, better perspective and view of your data all across your Microsoft suite.

In addition, it absolutely saves money. It brings a lot of efficiency when it comes to extracting and exporting data that is required by upper management.

The most valuable feature is the information protection because Windows Information Protection was discontinued from the M365 suite, which was Intune. It was very much in demand. Then Purview came in; it was Compliance Manager, and they changed the name to Purview. The information protection they inaugurated in Purview is the most demanded and the most useful in Purview.

Purview gives you a different perspective on exactly what is running in your organization. It's just very vast. I can't summarize it into one or two points. It starts off with records management, insider risk management, and information protection. And there is the discovery of the clouds, and we can get analytics on that as well, so that we know which user is using which cloud application and for how much time. The Activity explorer tells us which user was transferring out what data at what moment and on which device, including the serial number.

It was made for data protection in multi-cloud environments, but not just multi-cloud; it was made for on-prem as well. If our devices are hybrid, we can absolutely use Purview's data protection. Because it's a very new tool, people don't know exactly how important it is. It covers all my tenants in all my Microsoft applications, and I can get analytics through a couple of toggle buttons. 

The classifiers they have brought in are also important for any organization because, in the Content search, they have default classifiers that can actually detect when a user has been harassed or when a user has shared his personal banking details. That is important when it comes to compliance.

It's a lovely tool for supporting ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources. I worked with corporate devices in my previous project, wherein we were trying to connect the WhatsApp database with our Purview to have a better hold on the corporate devices and know what conversations were taking place. When talking about connectors, Purview is leveling up. It was just remarkable when I realized that we could actually set up a connector with WhatsApp for our Purview and have analytics from the database of our tenant.

It is a remarkable pivot that Microsoft has made in data analytics, data accumulation, and playing around with every single word that has been exchanged within the tenant or organization. It will do remarkably well in the future. We all know that there are a couple of other remarkable applications that Microsoft got, but it took 20 years. One example is Intune. Although Purivew is fairly new on the market, I'm pretty sure there will soon be more and more people trained on it, getting certified, and trying to implement the features for daily use in their organizations.

The best part about remediating the data on an organization's tenant is the recording audit they have started. It's a new feature that offers an auto-auditing mode in the Activity explorer, which constantly monitors all of the data. And, of course, according to the rules, it will drop notifications by email to the global admins.

And Compliance Manager is part of the solution, and you always get to see your real-time compliance score.

It would help if we could have a view of the devices we know to be potential weak points in an organization—those couple of devices that are very prone to external attacks. If we could have a view something like we have in CrowdStrike—which is, I believe, the biggest competitor to Microsoft when it comes to security—a node nodal view, which we also have in Defender, that would make it a more complete, one-stop solution. That would save a lot of time for the admins and the engineers.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for the past eight months.

I haven't had a chance to open up a ticket with Purview technical support yet.

When you talk about how important data loss prevention is in an organization, you can tell from its name, "data loss prevention". An organization should be ready for any notorious activities. That is where DLP comes in. We can set alerts and have custom policies. And we have the endpoint DLP settings as well. It is very similar to Windows Information Protection, which we used to use in past through Intune. But there is this new place from which we can set up the endpoint DLP and make sure that the probability of losing data is minimal.

As for using Purview for educating users on how to handle sensitive data, the recommendations are always Microsoft-specific, never engineer-specific. Microsoft has four templates for basic security, and it says that your security score will be 99 by using them. But it gets a little bit difficult for an end-user to work with them. It depends on the organization. We can sell the Activity explorer to a client so that we have constant monitoring of every single file that is changed, modified, archived, or shuffled from the cloud to a local device, if that is allowed in the organization. It provides a view of what the organization's data is doing, and we can give that to top management to provide them with more and more clarity.

It's too soon for me to say whether using Purview will reduce the number of solutions we have that interact with each other. If I have to do a message trace, I can go through a Content search on Exchange Online as well. If we're talking about the Activity explorer and giving visual context to where data is going and how it has been used, again, I can find that on the Defender portal. Based on my experience with Purview, it is more of a redundancy. Microsoft loves doing that, having the same features in different places. It's still a fabulous tool, but I have noticed a redundancy of features in other admin centers.

Purview has definitely helped to reduce the time to action on insider threats, but in comparison to Defender, it still needs a little bit of work. The features are on the redundant side. The admins do get notified in real time via email. It's similar to Defender, and I am looking forward to seeing what different aspects Purview will bring on when it comes to insider threats.

It has its pros and cons because it's fairly new. You have to understand what an organization is asking for, but once it is set up and it goes into its semi-automated mode, it is a time-saving machine.

We have got all kinds of things to include in it. Specifically, we are looking at the data classification piece and the data protection piece that goes into it. Those are the two immediate cases. We have got ECIF partners helping us with it, and Microsoft is heavily involved. These are the two initial ones, but as we continue to expand, we are going to bring more functionality under the purview of Purview. Those are the broader use cases right now, but the idea behind it is to simplify the landscape. 

The reason why we made the decision to go with E5 and Purview is that Microsoft's technology stack has now caught up with the rest of the industry. Our preference is to keep it all in one technology stack so that it makes things simpler to connect and maintain. Previously, we had a collection of a few different applications. We want to offset that purely from the complexity, cost, and technical debt standpoint, and we are invested with Microsoft. We like their technologies, and that is why we found the match. We ran the assessments, and there are still some things that are not quite there. We are hoping by the time our program gets to implement them, they are going to be ready. They are going to fulfill our requirements.

Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, including AWS and GCP, which is extremely important. We are primarily a Microsoft Azure house. We have taken that leap with them. We are a strategic framework partner, and we are proud of it. We are proud of the relationship, and we are growing within that framework. The footprint eventually has to mature to a multi-cloud capability. Anything that we do in the multi-cloud framework, if it cannot be addressed with the existing data protection toolset, it would be, at a minimum, frustrating. In the worst case, it would be a significant rebuild of our landscape. We would be taking a step back in time because of the fragmentation that we are doing today.

It is extremely important that Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world. There are different PII regulations, and there are specific regulations that are applicable to the utility business. Different countries have different data residency requirements. Can Purview help with that? That is a little bit of a long shot when it comes to expectations, but all of those pieces would help us because otherwise, we would have to build it from the ground. That was an expectation that I shared with the Microsoft team, and they brought specialists to the table, but from an automation standpoint, we are still pretty far away from that preferred goal.

We use Purview for data loss protection, but it is too early to assess Purview data loss protection for remediating policy violations. We are very hopeful about how we are going to set this up because it all depends on how you set up the policies. There is a lot of learning. We are going to set up the initial typesets, and then we are going to build on them as we go along, but I believe that everything that we need is there.

Purview has not affected the visibility we have into our estate because we have not quite reached that design aspect. We have not gone to that level of detail because we are still tinkering with a few other third-party products for visibility across our estate. It is an insightful question, but we have not quite thought it through.

Purview has not yet saved us money and time. It has cost us money to subscribe, so it has not saved us. There is a business case behind it where we do believe there is an offset of the third-party products, but the execution is going to determine how much of that projection we can actually meet. That is one piece of it. From a time standpoint, it is a productivity play. As we get more conversant with the platform or as our folks get more conversant with the platform, I believe this is going to become a lot easier for us to work with than some of our other products. Time will tell, but I believe this can get us there. Currently, we are in that early phase of understanding it, getting the structure built around it, and scaling our skillsets up, and then we can start talking about how we squeeze this and get better from productivity and other standpoints.

Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices, and data in other SaaS apps. Its connectivity to Android devices is not so important to us, but with all other devices, it is important. One of our biggest problems with Microsoft solutions is their closed-ended ecosystem approach not just with InfoSec solutions but also with some of the connectivity capabilities. It is very inspiring to hear them talk about fabric across the ecosystem boundaries. We hope to see more and more of that because if we are going to include what we have from Microsoft as our primary solution, it should replace the capabilities that are brought by other ecosystem-agnostic solutions.

It is pretty early, but the decision to go with this investment was largely driven by the simplification of our information security technology management stack. That is the primary objective. Once you simplify and you have a connected structure, it allows for faster adoption there. It also gives us additional capabilities as we go on using the technology that we are familiar with, and we do not have to depend on outside parties to come in and tell us how to do certain things. Obviously, as new features are rolled out, it is good to know and hear from Microsoft. In some cases, they are very helpful in getting them implemented. 

We have had a lot of issues since we moved to Unified Support. There have been work gaps there, and we believe they fixed them, but we need to make sure that they are going to be sustainable. It is to be seen.

In terms of features, our technical team would be able to speak about the areas of improvement better. In terms of additional features, that would again require a conversation with the technical team as we are thinking about what pieces and parts are missing. We have a feature set that we have shared with Microsoft, and that gets into a lot of detail. We did the analysis. We believe that we are on the road map for some of those feature sets.

Purview is a relatively newer offering. We upgraded to E5, and we are just starting to do the implementation. It has been about four months.

Stability-wise, it is there. The product is enterprise-grade, so definitely, there are no doubts in our mind about that. Its functionality and capability will keep improving as we go along. We are confident in the stability aspect.

Scalability should be fine. At least for our footprint, it should be fine. We are a 7,000-employee company, so it is not a huge footprint. If we are talking about mega giants, such as Saudi Aramco, or Procter and Gamble, that would be a different question.

We have had a lot of issues since we moved to Unified Support. It has largely been because of the amount of traffic that they have under Unified Support, and it almost feels like their back office is not necessarily trained very well to handle those kinds of calls. Instead of a high-tech solution offering, it is just something that people in the back office can hand off from one shift to another, so their transition points are not correct.

It is hard to find the right people at Microsoft to support the technologies that we have from them, but the account team has made a lot of effort. They have put a lot of effort and brought it to their attention. Kudos to them for trying to fix the problem, but it is still early to say if we are on what we call emergency support, or if this is a level of sustainable performance that they can bring, which is going to keep us happy. 

We were using other options. We had technology gaps. We had a fragmentation of visibility and things, but we were not able to get a full estate view of it. Those were all supposed to solve cancer and world hunger, but they did not, so we did not go into Purview with that mindset. However, what we are hoping for is that there would be incremental improvements that would get us enough visibility of real estate and help us solve the problems of the past.

I was not involved in its deployment. Our technical team handles that.

It is too early for that, but we are hopeful. We hope to see a landing point by the end of this year, and then start to ramp up on the value prop by the middle of next year.

The interesting part is how they are bundling the version into the E5 stack. If it was not for that inclusion, this would have been a difficult conversation for us, so kudos to Microsoft on that. Separating it out may become a problem for customer retention. It is definitely a good move on Microsoft's part to include it as part of any existing or any system upgrades for customers that were on E3. Is the cost good or bad? Any cost that is incurred is really about the value. Do we want to put a price on a breach? I hope not. That is where the cost comes in. The value comes in right there.

You get what you pay for most of the time, and that is just the reality in life. You can go out and buy six cheap items that do not work well together or you can invest with Microsoft in their stack, which allows us to keep everything working, as we would expect it to work, seamlessly and with as little ongoing investment. We have a very large partnership with Microsoft, and so from a cost standpoint, we are paying for it. We never like to pay for things, but we have to. We believe we are in a pretty fair spot with Microsoft on that.

The evaluation landed on the maturity scale that Microsoft had shown. We went through almost a year-long evaluation with them of our landscape, and during that stage, they went from multiple small snippets of PoCs, etcetera, to win the business and convince us more to say, "This is why we need to move there." It was a competitive analysis, but it was more time-based and maturity-based rather than Microsoft versus the rest of the world. Our intent was to move to Microsoft, but the question for us was—Was Microsoft ready?

To those evaluating this solution, I would advise making sure you go through a proper set of PoCs and give it adequate time. We gave it almost a year, and we still felt it was not enough time. Have a very clear definition of what your requirements, use cases, and expectations are, and truthfully check the boxes for yourself. It is not a comparison between Microsoft and other products. They all do the same thing differently. It is really a bottom-line comparison of whether it gets the job done and what is more important for you. Is the technology stack consolidation important, or having the best of the best for each of those capabilities is important? That is a differentiator for most companies. They have to get real clear in their heads.

I have not heard too many complaints. Given where we are, conservatively, I would rate Microsoft Purview a good solid six out of ten. It is not negative feedback, but it is just too early to say that it is going to check all the boxes for us. However, our initial impressions are great. As with every implementation, once the initial phase is over, we get into some of the details. We find gaps and some very positive things, but at the same time, we do not want to say it is going to work. There is a lot of learning that has to happen. How many gaps are going to remain still needs to be seen once we address the implementation across our landscape.

Our IT team, data engineering team, and data science team all rely on Microsoft Purview for a unified data repository. We maintain a table for storing sensitive data with segregated access. To readily understand the data types within, anyone can simply leverage Microsoft Purview's classification system. By selecting a specific classification, users gain access to relevant table details.

If we create keys for non-Microsoft data sources, we can leverage Purview's data connector platform to connect and ingest the data.

It is good that Purview takes into account critical regulations from around the world.

Microsoft Purview has greatly improved our organization's ability to view and share permissions with minimal human intervention. Searching for desired information is now a breeze. However, integrating permissions for access in large environments can be a stumbling block. With ten departments, granting access to a single table for one department is straightforward. But when access to multiple tables is required, they must go through the main administrator for verification.

Microsoft Purview shows us compliance in real-time.

Data segregation is the most valuable feature. This provides clear visibility into the hierarchy of data flow, including its destinations, loading points, and table updates.

While Microsoft Purview offers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, granting access in such complex settings can be lengthy and expensive.

Every scan we perform incurs a charge, making exploration quite costly.

I would like to have complete video documentation for training.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for six months.

In my experience with Microsoft Purview for our data governance project, I'd rate its stability at a seven out of ten. While it excels during exploration phases with use cases and demos, we encountered some challenges during implementation.

Each time we contact Microsoft support, the support person seems new and has to look into the issue because they've never encountered it before.

Neutral

Deploying initially is simple. It only takes as long as creating a storage account in the Azure portal, which is quick.

Microsoft Purview is expensive.

I would rate Microsoft Purview a seven out of ten.

Our current clients are medium-sized businesses.

In the six months we have been using Microsoft Purview it has not required any maintenance.

Most use cases are for DLP, data loss prevention, policies, and archiving, as well as creating retention policies and audit logs. 

If you want to do e-discovery searches, like tenant-to-tenant migration, or saving mailboxes to import into other mailboxes, you can use Purview for this as well.

Customers have seen a lot of benefits. It's reduced risk. Customers can monitor data and track discriminatory words. There are templates that you can use to send information about a breach of terms of service. They can do so much with a single product.

The most valuable features vary from organization to organization.

The e-discovery search is useful. It gives good insights into mailboxes. You can even discover emails you can't see, such as those that have been deleted. It's helpful for discovering any email at all. 

The deep search, the ability to search for content no matter where it is located, is quite helpful as well.

It helps with compliance.

The solution can be used in multiple cloud environments. Some organizations are not just Microsoft-driven. It is able to integrate well with other applications. They can't be just limited to a Microsoft environment.

It can provide access to iOS, Microsoft, Android, SaaS, and other apps. They might manage it via Microsoft InTune. However, they can monitor or track information across a variety of platforms. 

The ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources is good. There are data connectors from the admin center to help you get information from non-Mircosoft data centers. That's handy for those not heavy on Microsoft.

It integrates well with Office and Microsoft Dynamics. We can use Exchange and One Drive. We can monitor data everywhere online. We can do everything from the Azure portal. It's easy to set up and configure everything from the Azure portal. You can also select or remove certain applications. For example, depending on your use case, if you want, you can, for example, turn off SharePoint. You can also set up and monitor for abusive words or discriminatory language as well.

The solution was built to take into account critical regulations from around the world. For credit card protection, for example, they have different templates that handle different regulation requirements, and you can work towards creating your own custom templates if none of them suit your criteria.

It's great for remediating policy violations. It can detect them, and the AI can scan documents and patterns, including keywords, and it can detect specific information as required. Whatever the users are trying to achieve, it can assist. 

It's not difficult to educate users to protect data. There are links that describe what you can do and how best to use it. 

We like that the solution has extended into Mac OS endpoints. It has fewer limitations now. It's a game-changer. In a single glance of the dashboard, we can see a single platform and view of every endpoint, no matter the OS. We don't have to use multiple vendors. It's much easier to have one product that can solve multiple issues on multiple platforms. It's helped us reduce the number of solutions and simplified the complexity of data governance. When you reduce to a single product, it becomes far less complex. 

The visibility is great. Most customers challenge me to learn more about the product as they are very interested in what products like Purview can do. Those in the control department have been giving good feedback. 

The real-time compliance is very good. 

It helps reduce insider threats. Customers have found it really helps to do that. They can track and manage the uploading of one drive and the movement to another. 

The insights clients have from a single dashboard - being able to monitor and track everything and even improve their security posture, are really helping clients a lot. 

I'm not sure if there are any missing features. 

What I would like to see improved is the documentation scanning and printing.

The partial scripting could be improved with a better GUI.

It could reduce pricing to encourage usage. 

I've been using the solution for up to seven years. I worked as a Microsoft engineer and have helped troubleshoot issues across many Microsoft solutions, of which Purview is one of them.

The solution is stable and working fine.

It is a scalable solution. Microsoft has a knack for allowing its products to integrate with a lot of solutions. 

Typically, I troubleshoot myself for clients. 

I did not previously use a different solution.

I wasn't involved in the setup process. However, I have deployed it myself in my lab. Usually, I don't implement unless it's a new customer who is setting Microsoft up from scratch. 

There isn't much maintenance don't eh cloud-side, unless there are organizational or policy changes. You can test it out first before implementing anything organization-wide. 

I can't speak to the exact pricing. For my clients, it depends on the organization. Most find the cost to be high. Smaller companies may find it expensive, however, enterprises have no problem with it. 

I don't work too closely with the AI aspect of the solution. 

I'd advise others to use the solution. It increases the security posture of your organization. Security is not something that is absolute. No matter how sophisticated your software is, you need control, and Purview is the right way to go.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.