Microsoft Purview
Azure Policy keeps your resources in line. But a compliant storage account can still hold a spreadsheet of customer passport numbers that nobody knows about. Microsoft Purview is about the data itself: what you have, where it is, how sensitive it is, and who can do what with it.
What Microsoft Purview is
Microsoft Purview is a family of data governance, risk and compliance solutions that gives you a single, unified view of your data, wherever it lives: on-premises, in Azure and other clouds, and in software-as-a-service apps such as Microsoft 365. It is managed in the Microsoft Purview portal.
It grew out of two older products, Azure Purview (data governance) and the Microsoft 365 compliance tools, which is why its features fall into two broad areas.
Risk and compliance
These solutions protect sensitive data and help you meet regulations, across Microsoft 365 (Teams, OneDrive, Exchange, SharePoint), devices and other clouds:
- Information Protection: discover sensitive data and apply sensitivity labels (such as Confidential) that can encrypt it and follow it wherever it goes.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP): stop sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, from being shared or sent where it shouldn't go.
- Insider Risk Management: spot risky activity by people inside the organisation, such as mass downloads before someone leaves.
- Data Lifecycle and Records Management: keep what you must keep, for as long as you must, and delete the rest.
- Audit and eDiscovery: record activity, and find and hold content for investigations and legal cases.
- Compliance Manager: measure your progress against regulations and standards (such as GDPR or ISO 27001) with a compliance score and recommended improvement actions.
Unified data governance
These solutions help you understand and manage the data across your whole estate:
- Data Map: scans your data sources (Azure SQL, storage accounts, on-premises SQL Server, other clouds, SaaS apps) and builds an up-to-date map of your data, classifying it automatically (for example, finding columns that hold email addresses or ID numbers).
- Data lineage: shows where data came from and where it went, end to end.
- Unified Catalog: lets people find trustworthy data and understand it, with owners, descriptions and access policies.
- Insights into how your data is stored and used, and where the sensitive data is.
How Purview differs from its neighbours
| Tool | Governs | Typical question |
|---|---|---|
| Azure Policy | your Azure resources and their settings | "Only allow VMs in these regions." |
| Resource locks | individual resources | "Never delete this database by accident." |
| Microsoft Purview | your data, wherever it is | "Where is our customers' personal data, and is it protected?" |
| Microsoft Defender for Cloud | your security posture and threats | "Which VMs are missing updates? Is someone attacking us?" |
Microsoft's own compliance evidence
Purview helps you govern your data. When an auditor wants evidence about Microsoft, the documents are elsewhere:
- The Microsoft Service Trust Portal publishes Microsoft's independent audit reports (such as ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 1, 2 and 3), compliance guides and whitepapers. You sign in with a work or Microsoft account to download most of them.
- The Microsoft Trust Center explains Microsoft's security, privacy and compliance practices publicly.
The July 2026 skills outline no longer names the Service Trust Portal, but it can still come up as background to governance and compliance.