Microsoft Purview#

Purview is the Microsoft solution for managing data. In includes products for

  • Data Classification (Compliance manager, compliance.microsoft.com)

  • Data Scanning in the cloud (Via the governance portal)

  • Data Scanning on Prem (Information Protection Scanner & IntegrationRuntime)

Many of these are cross product, but it can help to think of them as separate products… or not. Some extra features of Purview also require additional add-ons (included at the E5 level):

  • Advanced Message Encryption

  • Information Rights Management

  • Azure Rights Management Service (RMS)

Azure Access#

These pages will be quite limited. I dont have access to an enterprise level environment and I’m using the free Azure account. I’m building these notes following the SC-400 course on learn.microsoft.com. I don’t recommend the course on it’s own. It is entirely theoretical (and a bit sales-y if I’m honest), and you aren’t given access to a test environment to try out the solution. That being said, I find I’ve learned more by simply having to install each product, maybe it will help you too. If you want to go more in-depth than I do, you’ll need an office or MS 365 account subscription.

Creating an Account#

As I’ve mentioned above, I’m using a free Azure account. If you’ve got one you can use, great. If not, some quick steps for creating one:

  1. Do EVERYTHING in a private/incognito window. The last thing you want to do is make changes to a production environment

  2. I’m also using my home lab VM for the installation & connections, I’d recommend something similar

  3. Create a new email, I’m using ProtonMail (also free). This will be an @proton.me email

  4. Create a new azure account (portal.azure.com). This will be an @onMicrosoft.com email
    You will need to register with a phone and CC, I will give MS props here, they explicitly say you’re charged $1 (& refunded) and you must manually move to ‘pay as you go’. Gave me a lot of confidence to try things out.

As I’ve said above, do EVERYTHING incognito, it’s just safer and stops you logging in to a production environment.

Next Steps#

From here, you should be OK to try any of the next products. If you’ve also done a new cloud account, you will likely need to set up Entra ID (prev Azure AD).