Purview & Compliance
Microsoft Purview & Compliance Administration
Protect and govern your organization’s sensitive data across Microsoft 365. Master data loss prevention, sensitivity labels, retention policies, eDiscovery, and insider risk management.
What is Microsoft Purview?
Microsoft Purview is the unified data governance and compliance platform in Microsoft 365. It helps organizations classify, protect, and manage sensitive information — ensuring regulatory compliance, preventing data leakage, and enabling legal investigations.
Data Loss Prevention
Detect and prevent sensitive information — credit cards, NI numbers, health data — from being shared outside the organization via email, Teams, or SharePoint.
Sensitivity Labels
Classify and protect documents and emails with labels that apply encryption, watermarks, and access restrictions — even when files leave the organization.
Retention Policies
Ensure data is kept for as long as required and deleted when no longer needed. Apply retention across Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive.
eDiscovery & Audit
Search, preserve, and export content across Microsoft 365 for legal investigations, compliance reviews, and regulatory requests using Content Search and eDiscovery cases.
Insider Risk Management
Detect and act on risky user behaviour — data exfiltration, policy violations, and departing employee activity — using machine learning-based signals.
Information Protection
Discover, classify, and protect sensitive data across your entire M365 environment using built-in sensitive information types and trainable classifiers.
Key Administration Topics
DLP Policy Management
- Creating DLP policies for Exchange, SharePoint, Teams
- Built-in sensitive information types (credit cards, NI numbers)
- Custom sensitive information types using regex and keywords
- Policy tips and user notification configuration
- Simulation mode — test before enforcing policies
- DLP reports and policy match activity review
Sensitivity Labels
- Label taxonomy design — Public, Internal, Confidential, Restricted
- Applying labels manually or via auto-labelling policies
- Label encryption and rights management settings
- Labels for Microsoft Teams, Groups, and SharePoint sites
- Trainable classifiers for intelligent auto-labelling
- Unified labelling across M365 and Azure Information Protection
Retention & Records Management
- Retention policies — Exchange, SharePoint, Teams chats and channels
- Retention labels for item-level lifecycle management
- Records declaration and immutable record locks
- Adaptive scopes — dynamically target users and sites
- Disposition review before final deletion
- Regulatory records for strict compliance requirements
eDiscovery & Audit
- Content Search — search email, files, Teams across the tenant
- eDiscovery (Standard) — holds, searches, and case management
- eDiscovery (Premium) — custodians, review sets, and export
- Litigation hold and in-place hold configuration
- Unified Audit Log — search and export admin/user activities
- Insider Risk Management policy setup and alert review
⚡ Common Troubleshooting Scenario
Issue: A DLP policy is configured to block emails containing credit card numbers, but users are still able to send them externally.
1️⃣ Verify the DLP policy is in Enforce mode (not Simulation/Test mode) — check the policy status in the Purview portal
2️⃣ Confirm the policy scope includes Exchange Online and covers the correct sender groups or all users
3️⃣ Review the condition match count — ensure it requires the correct number of credit card instances (default is 1)
4️⃣ Check if the sending user has a DLP override permission (some roles can bypass policy with a business justification)
5️⃣ Test the policy using the policy simulator with a sample email containing test credit card numbers
6️⃣ Review DLP policy match reports in the Purview portal to confirm whether matches are being detected but bypassed
🎓 Common Interview Questions — Purview & Compliance
- How do you create a DLP policy in Microsoft Purview to protect sensitive information?
- Where can you find the PII information dashboard in the Purview portal?
- What is the difference between a retention policy and a retention label?
- How do sensitivity labels work and how do they differ from Azure Information Protection labels?
- What is Insider Risk Management and when would you use it?
- What is the difference between eDiscovery Standard and eDiscovery Premium?
- How do you place a mailbox on litigation hold and what impact does it have?
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