Evolving data security threats, regulatory compliance requirements, and data governance needs have organizations increasingly turning to Microsoft Purview. But with such a powerful and expansive platform, the biggest challenge often isn’t how to use Purview — it’s where to start.
Whether beginning to explore Microsoft Purview or looking to refine its rollout strategy, asking the right foundational questions will help focus efforts and maximize impact.
Here are five essential questions to guide the journey.
1. What is (and isn’t) Microsoft Purview?
Microsoft Purview is a comprehensive data security, governance and compliance platform, which brings a wide range of valuable capabilities and features and some limitations. Its full value is only realized when paired with clearly defined goals and business alignment. Without that, organizations often find themselves deploying policies in silos, duplicating controls or over-engineering a system that becomes difficult to manage or scale.
Purview is:
- A tool for discovering, classifying and protecting data across your data estate
- A platform for managing compliance risks and regulatory obligations
- A solution for governing data across on-premises, M365 and select software-as-a-service environments
Purview is not:
- An automated data governance solution: Although Purview automates many aspects of data governance, human oversight is essential to interpret results, make informed decisions and fine-tune policies according to organizational needs.
- A tool that can protect against all data breaches: Purview enhances data security but does not guarantee protection against all kinds of data breaches. It is one piece of a broader security strategy that includes other measures such as threat protection, user training and network security.
- A one-size-fits-all solution: Organizations must configure and fine-tune Purview settings and policies to align with their specific data governance, security and compliance requirements.
Understanding what Purview can and cannot do helps set realistic expectations and ensures alignment between IT, compliance and business stakeholders. It also helps identify where Purview fits within a broader data protection ecosystem.
2. What are your data protection and governance goals?
Take a moment to define strategic objectives and how Microsoft Purview can:
- Support data classification and labeling efforts to ensure sensitive information is adequately labeled and protected?
- Monitor and mitigate compliance risks associated with evolving legal and regulatory requirements?
- Be leveraged to foster a culture of accountability and transparency in data governance practices?
While Purview is a mature product, we regularly tell our clients that deploying Purview is not just an IT project. A team of cross-functional leaders should mutually share ownership and provide input to a data protection initiative which leads to labels, helping users understand the impacts of encryption and other features. Pulling together the right team leads to success.
Clear goals will help prioritize which Purview capabilities to implement first, whether it’s information protection, data loss prevention, insider risk management or others.
Without a well-defined purpose, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the platform’s breadth and lose sight of strategic implementation objectives.
3. Which data protection programs already exist — and what is their maturity?
Before the Purview implementation begins, it is critical to assess the current state of data protection efforts. Ask:
- Do we already have data classification or labeling policies in place?
- How mature are the organization’s Information Protection, Data Loss Prevention or Insider Risk Management programs and are they compatible with Purview?
- How mature are our existing data governance capabilities?
This assessment will help identify gaps, redundancies and opportunities for integration. A mature information architecture can support efficient data lifecycle management implementation by ensuring that data is consistently classified and protected across its entire lifecycle. For example, Protiviti led a successful deployment of Information Protection at a large financial services client, bringing together compliance and legal expertise to ensure the program was in place, thoroughly vetted and ready for our technical implementation.
Understanding current maturity also helps avoid duplicating efforts and ensures that Purview enhances, rather than complicates, existing programs.
4. Which third-party tools are coming up for renewal?
Many organizations already use third-party tools for data governance, compliance and data security. Planning 12 months ahead of license renewal dates recently helped a Protiviti healthcare payer client be ready for a smooth transition of their data loss prevention (DLP) application to Purview.
If any of these tools are approaching renewal, it’s an ideal time to evaluate whether to consolidate tooling with Microsoft Purview.
Consider:
- Are we paying for overlapping functionality?
- Can Purview provide a more integrated or cost-effective solution?
- What would be the impact and key considerations of migrating from a third-party tool to Purview?
This question isn’t just about cost savings — it’s about simplifying the data protection stack and reducing the complexity of managing multiple platforms. In many cases, Purview can offer native integration with Microsoft 365 and Azure, streamlining operations and improving visibility.
5. Are we protecting our Microsoft 365 data along with other data sources?
The existing technology footprint plays a major role in how and where to begin with Purview. Start by mapping out:
- Which Microsoft 365 services are in use (e.g., Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive)?
- What non-Microsoft data sources are critical (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Salesforce)?
- What is the footprint of on-premises content?
- Where is sensitive or regulated data most likely to reside?
Organizations already heavily invested in Microsoft 365 may quickly gain value by enabling Purview’s built-in capabilities for data classification, labeling and data loss prevention. From there, it is possible to expand into scanning on-premises or multi-cloud environments.
Understanding the data landscape helps prioritize high-impact areas and build a phased rollout plan that aligns with the business’ needs.
Microsoft Purview offers a powerful foundation for modern data governance, security and compliance but success starts with asking the right questions. Clarify goals, understand the platform’s capabilities, assess current programs, evaluate third-party tools and map data sources to build a strategy that’s both practical and impactful.
Remember: Purview isn’t just a tool — it’s a catalyst for building a culture of data responsibility, transparency and trust.
To learn more about our Microsoft consulting services, contact us.
