Since Microsoft’s debut of Azure Purview security platform over a year ago, the platform has constantly been expanding a list of (already impressive) capabilities in terms of compliance and risk management.

In early February, Microsoft revealed the latest list of updates that promise enhanced data security for customers and partners, including the introduction of machine learning.

In this article, we’ll go over some of the key updates to the platform, along with some potential business benefits.

What does Microsoft Purview do?

Microsoft Purview is a family of data governance, risk, and compliance solutions that can help your organization govern, protect, and manage your entire data ecosystem. It provides absolute coverage to help businesses deal with the increases in remote user connectivity, unites disparate organisations through shared data, and modernises traditional IT roles.

General availability of Azure Purview was announced back in September 2021. Then in April last year, Microsoft announced that Azure Purview would become Microsoft Purview.

This change signalled an exciting shift in compliance and governance, making it much easier for organizations to better understand and safeguard their data across their entire data estate.

Businesses can use the tool to create holistic, up-to-date maps of your data landscape with automated data discovery, data classification, and end to end data lineage.

Adaptive protection

Adaptive protection is one of the most highly anticipated updates to Azure Purview, that aims to help customers increase security efficiency. In short, the goal is to ensure that businesses have the ability to target their protections against insider threats.

Insider risk management

Microsoft also announced that the new Purview risk management solution will include machine learning that can detect high priority threats, to help prevent data theft and leaks.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Microsoft also announced a preview for a “simulation mode” for data retention labels, which helps users with automatic testing and labelling. There’s hopes this new capability can be deployed more broadly in the near future.

Information protection

Providing sensitivity labelling, tailor-made data protection policies and capabilities for Microsoft 365 applications.

Recent updates included an introduction to more than 20 trainable data classifiers, which can be used to automate the classification of more than 30 types of data.