Microsoft Purview integrated portal

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One portal to rule them all

Microsoft Purview brings together data security, data governance, and other risk & compliance functions. This was not always the case. Some years ago we had specific data governance and data security solutions in both Microsoft (or even Office) 365 and Microsoft Azure. For structured data security and governance, we use the components of Azure Purview. And in Microsoft 365, the Security & Compliance Center and Azure Information Protection were used.

But looking back at the last 2 years, we have seen that Microsoft is completing the more holistic approach to data security, governance and compliance. Azure Purview allowed us to use sensitive information types and sensitivity labels common to Microsoft 365 in structured data platforms. And platforms like (as it was known than) Microsoft Cloud Apps Security extended the coverage to non-Microsoft cloud-platforms as-well.

Why this intro? Because even though Microsoft Purview has become the overarching name for all data security, governance and compliance solutions, there was no one gateway for these solutions. And now there is, with the introduction of the Purview admin-center.

Initial thoughts

Before I share some screenshots of the new Purview admin-center, let me share some first thoughts on this preview portal:

• Looks great, clean, relevant;
• It doesn’t provide much in the way of dashboarding;
• You can add the structured data Purview functions, by creating a Purview Enterprise account;
• Not all settings from the Compliance portal are here;
• There is no option to access the Microsoft 365 Data Classification components.

I do understand fully that this is still a preview portal. As such, most of the functions are redirected back to the compliance portal. But do expect to see more functions published to this new portal and not the Compliance portal in future. One example: the new eDiscovery (Premium) experience.

How does this look?

Let’s start with the look and feel of today. For the current compliance center, you go to https://compliance.microsoft.com. The structured data Purview is part of Microsoft Azure: https://portal.azure.com/#view/HubsExtension/BrowseResource/resourceType/Microsoft.Purview%2FAccounts and https://portal.azure.com/#view/HubsExtension/BrowseResourceBlade/resourceType/Microsoft.DataCatalog%2Fcatalogs

The Compliance portal from https://compliance.microsoft.com.

Microsoft Purview accounts from the Microsoft Azure portal.

The new portal

The new portal looks great and clean. All Purview components can now be accessed from one dashboard. Well, not exactly all. As I stated earlier – some of the risk & compliance components are not represented here. But I don’t doubt this will change fast.

At the right-hand top of the screen, you will notice some icons. From these, you can upgrade to Microsoft Purview Enterprise (see below), show notifications and announcements and access the settings page. Below you see the announcements section.

If you go for the View all solutions option, you will see these solutions grouped by category. This is also one way to get to the Settings page. The other option is using the icons on the top.

Settings

The Settings page in the current Compliance portal can sometimes be hard to find. It’s located at the bottom of the main menu in the portal. This settings page allows you to access the settings for things like Optical Character Recognition and the important co-authoring settings for Office on the Web.

The new Settings page combines parts of the current Compliance portal components and settings. Not all settings, but just a subset. And not all of the more general components, but (again) a subset. Here is how this looks like.

When selecting the options, you are not redirected back to the compliance portal. Instead, you can work from the new portal. For example, working with data connectors.

The Account part can be used to upgrade to Microsoft Purview Enterprise.

Upgrading to Microsoft Purview Enterprise

In my opinion, this is a somewhat misleading name. It might imply that there is a Microsoft Purview Standard (of Free) edition. And the Account option indeed shows the type as Free. But the risk and compliance features for Microsoft Purview, especially those of the E5 licensing options, are already Enterprise Grade.

But this Free vs. Enterprise option is related to the structured data component of Microsoft Purview. And this uses the Free option (which includes the components of Data catalog | Data share | Data map history) and the Enterprise version. Which offers:

If you need or want to, you can upgrade to the Enterprise version. Be very careful with this! Some years ago I was playing with Azure Purview and in the end got stuck with a $300 bill, because the unpaid preview was moved to the paid preview stage. My bad – but these costs were relatively high because of the fixed costs associated with the Always on Data Map processing capacity. As Microsoft states on Microsoft Learn:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/concept-elastic-data-map#data-map-billing

Also, as this account will deploy resources in Microsoft Azure, check for possible issues with (Security) policies. Fun fact: the Dutch policy NL BIO Cloud Theme for Microsoft Defender for Cloud blocked me creating the account. The reason, was the setting for Allowed Locations in this compliance policy.

That’s it

So, where do we stand? It’s great to see that the combined functions for data security, governance and compliance now have a dedicated portal. For now, most options are strictly redirected to the compliance portal. With one big exception. The Microsoft Purview Data Catalog function, that was normally accessed using the Azure portal, is now available from https://purview.microsoft.com.

I do hope that many of the risk & compliance and data security components will become available using this portal soon.