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22 Aug

|Microsoft, Technology

Exploring Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) with Microsoft Purview

In 2025, organisations that don’t want to fall behind have already made data one of their most important assets, leveraging this to achieved increased insights and inform decision making. However, unprecedented value goes hand in hand with unprecedented risk. Most business owners are usually left with a simple yet daunting question: ‘is our data really secure?‘ 

Fortunately, we live in the age of technology and Microsoft Purview has made it easier for organisations to answer that question simply and clearly. Purview has rapidly evolved into a central platform for managing, securing and understanding your organisation’s data. Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) is part of this evolution, focusing on reducing risk and strengthening the overall security of your data. 

What is Data Security Posture Management in Purview (DSPM)?

With the increasing complexity of data and the variety of data sources involved, DSPM offers a modern solution for safeguarding sensitive information across your data estate. DSPM offers a holistic view of your data and helps organisations to:

  • Get started with Microsoft Purview Data Security, recommending initial policies to help protect your data. 
  • Monitor which users have access to sensitive data.
  • Highlight misconfigurations and vulnerabilities across environments.
  • Provide actionable insights to improve your data security posture

By monitoring the security posture of your data, DSPM identifies vulnerabilities before they become incidents. DSPM correlates your data across other Microsoft Purview data security, risk and compliance solutions to take proactive action against visible threats. 

Why does DSPM matter?

With the rapid increase in cloud adoption and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, your data faces the risk of:

Data Sprawls

A data sprawl occurs when your organisations data lives across different systems and applications making it difficult to manage and secure.

Access Creep

Without regular reviews, your organisation can accumulate unnecessary permissions and access for outdated users. This effects the credibility of your organisations data.

Compliance Gaps

For organisations handling sensitive data, ineffective data handling could mean not meeting regulatory requirements for laws such as GDPR and HIPAA.

Heightened Breach Risks

Your organisations data could always be at the risk of being breached without proper oversight and ignoring vulnerabilities in your data estate.

DSPM helps you regain control and provides the clarity you need to deal with these challenges head on.

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) in Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview integrates DSPM into it’s unified central governance platform. DSPM’s ability to identify risk and unprotected data can be easily accessed through Microsoft Purview. The feature allows you to monitor cross-cloud data and user access through reporting and trend analysis.

The DSPM workflow in Purview allows you to get data security recommendations and gain insights into your data security posture to make data loss prevention policies (DLP). After you have gained insights into your security posture, you can track it overtime with different forms of reporting. Microsoft Purview’s Copilot integration can also help you investigate alerts and identify patterns to pinpoint security risks.

For organisations that are just starting with Microsoft Purview, DSPM provides easy configuration and enables you to create new policies across multiple data security solutions. DSPM also helps you get started quickly with other Microsoft Purview features like Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Information protection and Insider Risk Management.

Conclusion

Traditional security solutions are no longer enough for the large amounts of complex data that most organisations deal with these days. DSPM, powered by Microsoft Purview gives organisations the luxury of controlling and protecting their data through recommendations and actionable insights. Adopting DSPM will allow your organisation to shift from reactive decision making to proactive decision making, building a wall of trust and resilience around your data.

How Simpson Associates can Help You?

As a Microsoft Solutions Partner and a Microsoft Partner of the year award winner for 2024, our talented team of purview consultants have what it takes to help you tackle the challenge of data security by utilising DSPM in Microsoft Purview. From initial discovery and Purview implementation to ongoing governance and optimisation, our team will ensure your data is secure, compliant, and ready to support your strategic goals.

Interested in getting started with Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)? Have a look at our range of Microsoft Purview Consulting services or get in touch with us via email or live chat.

Blog Author:

Peter West, Azure cloud engineer at Simpson Associates