Microsoft Purview Enhances Data Security and Governance Readiness

An insurance and financial services organization provides personal insurance, business insurance, employee benefits, and financial services throughout the country. With a workforce operating within a Microsoft 365 environment, the organization manages a significant volume of sensitive data across Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange every day.

As the company began exploring the adoption of Microsoft Copilot and generative AI tools, they saw an opportunity to proactively strengthen its data security and governance posture before expanding AI use across the business. Copilot's ability to surface information from across a Microsoft 365 tenant makes it important for organizations to have a clear picture of where sensitive data lives, who can access it, and what policies are in place to protect it.

The company engaged Emergent Software to deploy Microsoft Purview as the foundation for their data security and governance program, combining a Purview Quick Start engagement with a Microsoft-funded Data Security Assessment to give the organization a comprehensive view of its environment and a practical framework for managing it going forward.

Emergent Software structured the engagement around two complementary workstreams. The first was a Purview Quick Start, designed to introduce the organization's administrators to the Microsoft Purview platform, build out foundational data security capabilities, and establish a practical framework for protecting sensitive information across their Microsoft 365 environment. The second was a Microsoft-funded Data Security Assessment, made available based on the company size and license level, which allowed the team to go deeper into the environment and surface detailed insights about data risk and usage patterns.

During the Quick Start, Emergent worked with the internal team's security and SharePoint leads to identify categories of sensitive information present in the environment and build out sensitivity labels that could be applied to documents and communications. Data Loss Prevention policies were configured to automatically protect sensitive content in transit, ensuring that files containing regulated information could be blocked or encrypted when sharing fell outside of policy. Data retention policies were introduced to give the company a structured approach to managing how long different categories of content are kept and when they are automatically removed, an increasingly important consideration as AI tools make older content more discoverable.

Emergent also helped the internal administrators understand the broader Purview platform and how its capabilities mapped to their specific licensing. Trial E5 licenses were activated during the engagement to demonstrate advanced capabilities including insider risk management and automated sensitivity labeling, giving the organization's leadership a firsthand look at what would become available as part of a planned licensing upgrade. Working sessions were structured to ensure that the administrators who would own these tools after the engagement concluded had both the conceptual understanding and the hands-on experience to manage them confidently going forward.

The Data Security Assessment added a further layer of insight. Using Purview's eDiscovery platform, Emergent ran reports across the business environment to surface aggregate data on stale content, risky user behaviors, and potential data exposure patterns. The assessment surfaced millions of aging or unused files across the environment, providing concrete evidence to inform future decisions around data retention policy and content lifecycle management. These findings gave stakeholders across the business the information they needed to have meaningful conversations about how to govern their data and where policy changes would have the most impact.

The client completed the engagement with a functioning data security foundation in Microsoft Purview, a trained team of administrators equipped to manage and extend those capabilities, and a detailed picture of their data landscape. Sensitivity labels, Data Loss Prevention policies, and retention frameworks are in place and being piloted across the company, with the infrastructure ready to scale to the full employee and contractor population as internal decisions are finalized.

The Data Security Assessment gave internal leadership quantifiable evidence about the state of their environment. Surfacing the millions of aging files provided a clear starting point for data lifecycle conversations across the organization, establishing a shared foundation for decisions about how long different types of content should be retained and how automated policies can reduce accumulation going forward. Having that data in hand allows the right stakeholders, including legal counsel and department leaders, to weigh in on policy decisions with real context rather than estimates.

The engagement also clarified and accelerated the path forward for the organization's broader Microsoft investment. The client is actively working with Emergent and Microsoft on a transition from an E3 to an E5 licensing structure, a move that will unlock the full suite of Purview capabilities previewed during the engagement alongside Defender for Cloud Apps, Microsoft Intune, and advanced email security features. Microsoft funding associated with the license transition will allow Emergent to return to the environment and enable the policies and configurations that the trial licenses demonstrated. The Purview Quick Start has positioned the organization to move quickly and confidently into that next phase, with the administrative knowledge and governance framework already in place to support it.