Plan your beginning compliance tasks in Microsoft Purview

  • 8 minutes

The prior unit examined the high-level tasks necessary to implement security and compliance within Microsoft 365. This unit focuses on a specific aspect within those tasks, which involves the compliance tasks that organizations should complete within Microsoft Purview.

If you're new to Microsoft Purview and wondering where to start, this unit provides guidance on the basics and prioritizes important compliance tasks. The purpose of this unit is to help you quickly get started with:

  • Managing and monitoring your data
  • Protecting information
  • Minimizing insider risks

This unit is also helpful if you're figuring out how best to:

  • Manage risks
  • Protect your data
  • Remain compliant with regulations and standards with a newly remote workforce

Employees are now collaborating and connecting with each other in new ways. As such, an organization's existing compliance processes and controls may need to adapt. Identifying and managing these new compliance risks within an organization is critical to safeguarding its data and minimizing threats and risks.

After an organization completes these basic compliance tasks, it should consider expanding its compliance coverage by implementing more Microsoft Purview solutions.

Task 1: Configure compliance permissions

The Microsoft Purview compliance portal provides easy access to the data and tools an organization needs to manage its compliance needs. It’s important to manage who in an organization has access to the Microsoft Purview compliance portal to view content and perform management tasks. Microsoft 365 provides administrative roles specific to compliance and for using the tools included in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal.

An organization should start by assigning compliance permissions to the appropriate people. By doing so, they can perform these tasks and prevent unauthorized people from having access to areas outside of their responsibilities. An organization should also ensure that it assigned the proper people to the Compliance data administrator and the Compliance administrator roles. It should do so before it starts to configure and implement compliance solutions included with Microsoft 365. It must also assign users to the Microsoft Entra global reader role if it wants them to view data in the Compliance Manager tool.

Task 2: Know your state of compliance

It’s difficult to know where to go if you don’t know where you are. To meet its compliance needs, an organization must understand its current level of risk and what updates it may need in these ever-changing times. The single best thing an organization can do to improve compliance is to understand its current state of compliance. This statement is true whether an organization is new to compliance requirements or has deep experience with standards and regulations that govern its industry.

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager can help an organization understand its compliance posture. It can also highlight areas that may need improvement. Compliance Manager uses a centralized dashboard to calculate a risk-based score, measuring an organization's progress in completing actions that help reduce risks around data protection and regulatory standards. An organization can also use Compliance Manager to track its risk assessments. It provides workflow capabilities to help an organization efficiently complete its risk assessments through a common tool.

Important

Most organizations tightly integrate security and compliance. It’s important that an organization address basic security, threat protection, and identity and access management areas. Doing so helps it provides a defensive, in-depth approach to both security and compliance. Organizations should check their compliance score in Compliance Manager. They should then complete the tasks outlined in the following articles: Security roadmap - Top priorities for the first 30 days, 90 days, and beyond and Top 12 tasks for security teams to support working from home.

Additional reading. For step-by-step guidance to get started with Compliance Manager, see Get started with Compliance Manager.

Task 3: Enable auditing for your organization

At this point, an organization should have determined its current state and assigned permissions to the users who can manage compliance functions. The next step is to ensure it has the data to conduct compliance investigations and generate reports for network and user activities. Enabling auditing is also an important prerequisite for compliance solutions covered later in this unit.

Insights provided by the audit log are a valuable tool in helping to match an organization's compliance requirements to solutions that can help it manage and monitor compliance areas needing improvement. An organization must enable audit logging before the system records activities and before it can search the audit log. When enabled, Microsoft 365 records user and administrator activity in the audit log and retains it for 90 days. Microsoft 365 can also retain this activity for up to one year depending on the license assigned to users.

Additional reading. For step-by-step instructions to turn on auditing, see Turn audit log search on or off.

Task 4: Create policies to alert you about potential compliance issues

Microsoft provides several built-in alert policies that help identify:

  • Permissions abuse by administrators
  • Malware activity
  • Potential external and internal threats
  • Data lifecycle management risks

Microsoft 365 turns on these policies by default. However, an organization may need to configure custom alerts to help manage specific compliance requirements.

Organizations can use alert policies and alert dashboard tools to create custom alert policies. They can also use these features to view the alerts generated when users perform activities that match the policy conditions. For example, an organization can use alert policies to track user and admin activities affecting compliance requirements, permissions, and data loss incidents.

Additional reading. For step-by-step guidance to create custom alert policies, see Alert policies in Microsoft 365.

Task 5: Classify and protect sensitive data

Users in an organization often collaborate with others both inside and outside their company. By doing so, content no longer stays behind a firewall. It can roam everywhere, across devices, apps, and services. And when it roams, organizations want it to do so in a secure, protected way that meets their business and compliance policies.

Sensitivity labels let organizations classify and protect their data. In doing so, these labels don't hinder their users' productivity and their ability to collaborate. Organizations can use sensitivity labels to:

  • Enforce message encryption
  • Enforce usage restrictions
  • Apply visual markings
  • Protect information across platforms and devices, on-premises and in the cloud

Additional reading. For step-by-step guidance to configure and use sensitivity labels, see Get started with sensitivity labels.

Task 6: Configure retention policies

A retention policy lets you proactively decide whether to retain content, delete content, or both retain content and then delete it at the end of a specified retention period. Organizations may need to comply these actions with industry regulations and internal policies. Organizations involved in litigation or a security breach can also use these actions to reduce their risk.

When content is subject to a retention policy, people can continue to edit and work with the content as if nothing changed. The system retains the content in place, in its original location. But if someone edits or deletes content that's subject to the retention policy, the system saves a copy of the original content to a secure location. The content stays retained in that location while the retention policy for that content is in effect.

An organization can quickly put retention policies in place for multiple services in its Microsoft 365 environment. These services include:

  • Teams and Yammer messages
  • Exchange email
  • SharePoint sites
  • OneDrive accounts

There are no limits to the number of users, mailboxes, or sites that a retention policy can automatically include. But if an organization needs to get more selective, it can do so by configuring either:

  • An adaptive scope. A query-based policy that dynamically targets specific instances.
  • A static scope. A policy that specifies specific instances to always include or always exclude.

Additional reading. For step-by-step guidance to configure retention policies, see Create and configure retention policies. Because retention policies form the cornerstone of a data lifecycle management strategy for Microsoft 365 apps and services, also see Get started with data lifecycle management.

Task 7: Configure sensitive information and offensive language policies

Protecting sensitive information and detecting and acting on workplace harassment incidents is an important part of compliance with internal policies and standards. Communication compliance helps minimize these risks by helping organizations quickly detect, capture, and take remediation actions for email and Microsoft Teams communications. These risks include:

  • Inappropriate communications containing profanity, threats, and harassment.
  • Communications that share sensitive information inside and outside of the organization.

A predefined Offensive language and anti-harassment policy template enables organizations to scan internal and external communications for policy matches. Reviewers can investigate scanned email, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, or third-party communications in their organization. They can also take appropriate remediation actions to make sure they're compliant with their organization's standards.

The predefined Sensitive information policy template helps organizations quickly create a policy to scan email and Microsoft Teams communications containing defined sensitive information types or keywords. By doing so, the policy can help ensure that users don't share that important data with people that shouldn't have access to it. These activities may include unauthorized communication about confidential projects or industry-specific rules on insider trading or other collusion activities.

Additional reading. For step-by-step guidance to plan and configure communication compliance, see Plan for communication compliance and Get started with communication compliance. For communication compliance licensing information, see Microsoft 365 licensing guidance for security & compliance.

Task 8: See what's happening with your sensitive items

Organizations can use the following Microsoft 365 features to classify and label sensitive items across Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive:

  • Sensitivity labels
  • Sensitive information types
  • Retention labels and policies
  • Trainable classifiers

The last step in your quick task journey is to see which items the system labeled and what actions your users took on those sensitive items. Content explorer and Activity explorer provide this visibility.

Content explorer

Content explorer enables an organization to view, in their native format, all the items that:

  • The system classified as a sensitive information type.
  • Belong to a certain classification by a trainable classifier.
  • Have a sensitivity or retention label applied.

Additional reading. For step-by-step guidance to using content explorer, see Know your data - data classification overview, and Get started with content explorer.

Activity explorer

Activity explorer helps an organization monitor the steps taken with its classified and sensitive items across:

  • SharePoint
  • Exchange
  • OneDrive

There are over 30 different filters available for use, including:

  • Date range
  • Activity type
  • Location
  • User
  • Sensitivity label
  • Retention label
  • File path
  • DLP policy

Additional reading. For step-by-step guidance to using activity explorer, see Get started with activity explorer.