Security, Compliance and Governance. Not the same!

In today’s data-driven world, protecting sensitive information isn’t just a technical necessity, it’s a strategic imperative. Organizations must ensure their data is secure, legally compliant, and responsibly managed. Microsoft Purview offers a unified approach to achieving this through three interconnected pillars: Data Security, Data Compliance, and Data Governance.

Data Security: Protect What Matters

Data security protects information from unauthorized access, breaches, and misuse. It defines who can access data and how it can be used, ensuring sensitive content remains confidential and controlled.

Example:   Using Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels with Information Protection policies, organizations can apply encryption and access controls to emails and documents containing financial or confidential data, keeping critical information safe from prying eyes.

Data Compliance: Prove Lawful Use

Data compliance ensures your organization meets regulatory and legal obligations such as GDPR, CCPA, and Malaysia’s PDPA. It’s not just about following rules, it’s about demonstrating that your data handling practices are lawful and transparent.

Example:   Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies help enforce rules that prevent regulated data, like personal or health information, from being shared outside approved channels, reducing risk and proving compliance.

Data Governance: Define and Align

Data governance provides the strategic framework for how data is defined, owned, classified, and used across the organization. It ensures that data is trusted, discoverable, and used responsibly by everyone who touches it.

Example:   With Microsoft Purview Data Map and Unified Catalog, teams can discover, classify, and track data lineage across Azure, Microsoft 365, and multi-cloud environments, giving everyone a consistent view of where data lives and how it flows.

The Unified Model: Why Integration Matters

When treated as separate silos, security, compliance, and governance create blind spots. But when integrated, they form a powerful model:

• Security protects data

• Compliance proves lawful use

• Governance defines how data should be managed

  
  

Microsoft Purview enables organizations to apply encryption and access controls (security), retention and DLP policies (compliance), and enterprise-wide data discovery and classification (governance) across their entire data estate.

The result? Data that’s not only protected and compliant, but also trusted, usable, and scalable.