Governance & compliance are key to maintaining control

Azure offers a range of governance and compliance features to help your organisation manage your platform, protect your data and comply with various regulations. These include:

• Azure Policy
• Role-Based Access Control
• Privileged Identity Management

Azure Policy allows administrators to create policies to control admin and user behaviour. These policies can be used to enforce security controls, ensure compliance with regulations, and manage or restrict resource usage. Azure Policy works across the entire Azure platform, providing a consistent governance framework.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enables fine-grained control over administration rights, allowing admins and users to be given very specific rights to particular elements of Azure so that they can only manage or change those items.

Privileged Identity Management (PIM) provides the capability to allow a user’s permissions to be elevated on a request/just-in-time basis.  This supports a key governance principle that administrators should not have elevated permissions until they actually need them.  With PIM, elevated permissions requests can be subject to approval workflow, can have multi-factor authentication enforced, and can be time-bound and audited.  PIM is particularly useful for managing permissions elevation for third parties (such as when an external agent requires access to fix a problem).

Power Platform offers a range of governance and compliance features to help your organisation or business protect your data, manage your environment and comply with any required regulations. These include:

• Centre of Excellence
• Data loss prevention
• Role-based access control

The Centre of Excellence (COE) is a set of tools that are intended to help manage, govern, control and promote the best practice use of Power Platform within your organisation. The governance component provides elements such as environment management, data governance, access control, lifecycle management and app auditing.

Data loss prevention (DLP) policies can be used to prevent the accidental sharing of sensitive information in Power Apps and Power Automate.

Role-based access control (RBAC) allows administrators to control user access to resources in Power Platform. RBAC can be used to ensure that users have access only to the resources that they need to perform their job functions.

Additionally, Power Platform offers audit and compliance features that allow administrators to monitor user activity and ensure compliance with regulations such as GDPR. Audit logs record all user activity in Power Platform and can be used to monitor suspicious activity or investigate security incidents.

Microsoft Purview

Purview is a collection of governance and compliance solutions that work across your entire estate, including on-premises, Microsoft 365, Azure, and third-party solutions like Amazon S3.  IT provides a number of benefits, including:

• Helping you to gain visibility into assets across your entire data estate.
• Enabling central access to all your data, security, and risk solutions.
• Safeguarding and managing sensitive data across clouds, apps, and endpoints.
• Managing end-to-end data risks and regulatory compliance.

The Purview suite includes over twenty tools, such as:

• Audit
• Information Protection
• Compliance Manager
• Data Lifecycle Manage
• Data Loss Prevention
• eDiscovery

Ultimately, Purview provides a comprehensive set of capabilities to help your organisation or business govern, protect, and manage data across your platforms and services.