Ensuring data security and regulatory compliance in today’s fast-evolving digital landscape is more challenging than ever. Organisations must manage vast amounts of sensitive information while navigating complex regulations, mitigating security risks, and maintaining compliance. Failing to implement strong data security measures can lead to regulatory fines, reputational damage, and legal consequences.
The growing adoption of AI further complicates data security, with Microsoft’s 2024 Digital Defense Report highlighting that “the use of generative AI applications can pose serious risks to organisations that haven’t implemented sufficient data governance controls.”
To strengthen data security and mitigate compliance risks, organisations must take a proactive approach to securing their data. Microsoft Purview provides powerful tools for classifying and protecting sensitive data, assessing risks, responding to investigations, and ensuring compliant communication across the enterprise.
In this guide, we’ll explore how Microsoft Purview can help your organisation enhance data security, navigate compliance challenges, and ensure regulatory alignment.
1. Strengthening Data Security & Compliance with Classification and Governance
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organisations must carefully manage their records and information lifecycle to meet increasing legal and regulatory requirements. This means retaining necessary data, while securely disposing of redundant or obsolete information across the enterprise.
Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management helps organisations tackle this challenge by simplifying data security, offering automated classification and governance capabilities at scale. These tools automatically detect and classify sensitive information—such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), financial records, and intellectual property—ensuring it is protected and managed appropriately.
Key Capabilities of Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management
- Data Retention and Deletion – Minimise risk and liability by ensuring only essential data is retained while obsolete information is securely deleted across your entire digital ecosystem.
- Records Management – Effectively manage high-value records while meeting legal and regulatory obligations.
- Automated Policies – Scale classification and governance using automated policies based on file attributes, sensitive data detection, or machine learning capabilities.
- Proof of Compliance – Strengthen compliance efforts with label analytics insights, defensible disposal mechanisms, and comprehensive audit trails.
By leveraging Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management, organisations can seamlessly enforce governance policies, enhance regulatory compliance, and streamline data management at scale.
2. Securely Storing and Retaining Core Business Records
Maintaining data security involves not only protecting sensitive information but also ensuring regulatory compliance through effective records management. Most organisations are required to comply with strict regulatory requirements for records management, ensuring critical business, legal, and compliance-related documents are properly stored and retained, while also properly disposing of any records which are no longer needed.
Microsoft Purview Records Management provides a powerful solution to manage and securely store regulatory, legal, and business-critical records. It helps organisations retain records in secure, immutable, and compliant formats while streamlining governance and compliance processes.
Key Capabilities of Microsoft Purview Records Management
- Label items as a record– Create and configure retention labels to designate items as records. These labels can be applied manually by users or automatically by identifying sensitive information, keywords, or content types.
- Migrate and manage your retention requirements with file plan– Leverage a file plan to seamlessly integrate an existing retention strategy into Microsoft 365 or create a new one for improved management and compliance oversight.
- Set up retention and deletion settings with retention labels– Define retention labels with specific retention periods and actions based on factors such as the date an item was last modified or created, ensuring effective data management and compliance.
- Trigger Retention Periods with Event-Based Retention – Initiate retention periods based on specific events, ensuring compliance and efficient data lifecycle management.
- Review and validate disposition– Conduct disposition reviews and maintain proof of records deletion to ensure compliance and verify proper data disposal.
- Export Disposition Data – Use the export option to generate detailed reports on all disposed items, ensuring transparency and compliance tracking.
- Define Role-Based Permissions for Records Management – Assign specific permissions to records managers, ensuring they have the appropriate access to perform their duties effectively and securely.
By adopting Microsoft Purview Records Management, organisations can enhance data security by maintaining regulatory compliance, streamline the records management process, and ensure their data retention strategies align with business and legal requirements.
3. Identification and Investigation of Legal Risks
If your organisation is faced with a legal matter or internal investigation, one of the first steps you’ll be required to take is identifying where relevant data is stored. This involves pinpointing key individuals and their data sources, applying legal holds to preserve critical information, and managing the communication process to ensure compliance with legal requirements.
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery streamlines the investigative process with a comprehensive workflow for preserving, collecting, analysing, reviewing, and exporting content for both internal and external investigations, including data spillage incidents. Its advanced machine learning capabilities—such as deep indexing, email threading, and near-duplicate detection—enhance data analysis, enabling faster identification of relevant information. Additionally, Copilot for Security in Microsoft Purview enhances efficiency by providing contextual summaries of review set items, enabling reviewers to quickly identify, tag, and export critical data.
4. Streamline Forensic Investigations with Audit-Ready Reporting and Insights
Your organisation may be required to conduct forensic or compliance investigations, particularly when assessing potential security breaches and determining the extent of a compromise. This often requires detailed insights, such as what a user searched for and when, as well as the access, reply, or forwarding history of specific emails.
Microsoft Purview Audit enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of forensic investigations by providing comprehensive visibility into user activity, high-bandwidth data access, and detailed reporting to support audit readiness. Additionally, it enables long-term audit log preservation for up to 10 years, helping organisations meet regulatory compliance requirements with confidence.
5. Detection of Potential Compliance or Business Conduct Violations in Communications
Ensuring compliant communication is essential for protecting sensitive information and detecting inappropriate content, such as harassment, threats, or adult material.
Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance helps organisations identify potential compliance violations, including those related to regulations like SEC and FINRA. Designed with privacy in mind, it features role-based access controls, default pseudonymisation of usernames, and audit logging to safeguard user privacy. Additionally, it extends compliance monitoring to Generative AI, detecting violations in AI-generated content, including prompts and responses from Copilot for Microsoft 365.
6. Continuously Monitor and Evaluate Your Compliance Performance
Managing compliance across your data estate can be complex, requiring you to identify data protection risks, implement controls effectively, stay up to date with evolving regulations and certifications, and ensure audit readiness.
Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager simplifies this process by helping you continuously assess and track your compliance performance. It offers pre-built assessments aligned with common industry and regulatory standards, step-by-step guidance for improving compliance, and a risk-based compliance score to provide clear insights into your compliance posture. These capabilities help organisations to enhance data security, stay ahead of compliance risks, and demonstrate audit readiness.
Strengthen Your Data Security & Compliance with mobco
Take the next step in securing and governing your data with Microsoft Purview—partner with mobco, a trusted Microsoft Solutions Partner specialising in Information Protection and Governance.
Our experts are here to help your organisation enhance data security, ensure regulatory compliance, and mitigate risks with tailored solutions. Get in touch today for a no-obligation consultation and discover how we can support your data security needs.