When your organization has data, it is essential that it is handled correctly. Companies not only have to comply with national laws, but also with state or regional laws and industry-specific regulations. In addition, businesses are often required to keep records of user activities for many years, while still respecting user privacy and the right to request, amend, and remove information. This is where Microsoft Purview in Azure comes in.
The Microsoft Purview Compliance Portal
The central location for compliance in Microsoft is the Microsoft Purview compliance portal, available at https://compliance.microsoft.com.
When you sign in, the home page presents several cards that summarize key compliance information. One of the most important tools available here is the Compliance Manager, which helps organizations manage their compliance requirements.
Compliance Manager includes:
- Pre-built assessments for industry, regional, and country requirements, with the option to create custom assessments for your specific compliance needs.
- Explanations of complex legal and regulatory language in plain English.
- Mapping of regulatory requirements to recommended improvement actions, complete with guidance.
- Workflows for completing risk assessments.
- A compliance score, which provides a clear indicator of your current compliance posture.
Another useful card is the Solution catalog, which links to integrated solutions that can help manage compliance scenarios. These integrate well with governance features such as Tags in Azure.
Main Areas of Microsoft Purview
The Microsoft Purview compliance portal is organized into several core areas:
- Information Protection and Governance
- Protects and governs data across your organization.
- Covers data loss prevention (DLP), information governance, information protection, and records management.
- This works alongside broader governance approaches discussed in Azure Cost Management.
- Insider Risk Management
- Helps you identify, analyze, and reduce risks from within your organization before they become critical.
- Includes communication compliance features.
- Discovery and Response
- Enables you to deal with compliance issues.
- Includes Audit, Data Investigation, and Data Subject Requests (for regulations such as GDPR).
- Provides eDiscovery to identify and collect electronic information for legal cases. You can search across services such as Exchange Online, Microsoft 365 Groups, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business conversations, and Yammer teams.
- Privacy Risk Management and Subject Rights Requests
- Integrated with Microsoft Priva, these tools support GDPR and other privacy regulations by helping manage requests from individuals about their personal data.
- Alerts and Monitoring
- The Active alerts card displays the most important alerts, along with details such as severity, status, category, and last activity.
- More detail is available in the Alerts section on the left-hand pane of the portal.
- Additional cards can be added to customize the portal to your organization’s needs.
Why Microsoft Purview Matters
Microsoft Purview provides a unified solution for:
- Protecting sensitive data.
- Monitoring risks from internal and external sources.
- Meeting legal and industry compliance requirements.
- Simplifying complex regulations into actionable steps.
- Supporting regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and NIST.
By linking with other governance and management tools such as Tags and Azure Cost Management, Purview helps build a complete compliance and governance framework in Azure.
Next Steps
Understanding Microsoft Purview is just one piece of the puzzle when preparing for the AZ-900 exam and working with Azure in practice. If you’d like to see these concepts explained clearly with live demonstrations, check out our AZ-900 video course — it’s designed to make complex topics approachable and engaging – or click here to go back to the Microsoft AZ-900 list of topics.
Please click here to find out more about Microsoft’s AZ-900 exam.
