Microsoft Purview Information Protection is an intelligent solution with built in, unified and extensible capabilities that helps you discover, classify, and protect sensitive data wherever it resides or travel. These capabilities enable you to know your data, protect your data, prevent data loss and govern your data.
Microsoft Purview Information Protection is included in the Microsoft E5 License; however, full license requirements depend on the capabilities you would like to use. To learn more about the licensing kindly click here
Know your Data
This is the first step in information protection, it is important to know your data and understanding your data landscape i.e., what type of data your organization has, where this data resides and how the users are handling and sharing this data. Microsoft Purview Information protection includes the following tools to help you know your data
- Content Explorer to help you understand exactly where the data is located in your Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams and OneDrive for business environment
- Information Protection Scanner to discover and understand the data that you have in your on-premises repositories
- Activity Explorer to understand what your users are doing with this data
Protect your Data
Once you know and understand your data, you can now classify this data with sensitivity labels and apply flexible protection that included encryption and visual markings to the data. The following services helps you achieve this
- Trainable classifiers and Sensitive Information Types to classify data and apply sensitivity labels to provide encryption and visual markings
Prevent Data Loss
After knowing your data and applying protection, the next step is to prevent accidental or intentional loss of this data. Microsoft Purview Information Protection has the following services to help you prevent data loss
- Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention which helps you prevent the intentional or unintentional sharing of sensitive data
- Endpoint DLP which extends the prevention capabilities to Windows 10/11 devices and some versions of Mac OS. Click here to view updated list of supported OS for endpoint DLP
- Insider Risk Management that correlates various signals to to help you quickly identify, triage and act on any risky exfiltration activities
Govern your Data
In governing your data, here is where you can create policies that will allow you enforce retention and deletion in a compliant manner. Some regulations require you to delete data from your organization after a specified period. You can use Microsoft Purview Data Lifecyle Management and Microsoft Purview Records Management for this