Rising costs of storage, improved compliance and reduced risk are just some of the reasons that organisations are adopting Microsoft Purview (and of course, to provide high quality data for AI!). Purview’s data lifecycle management functionality (DLM) is rich and comprehensive and can be a key enabler for an organisation to make a step change in its overall information governance position – retaining their valuable information and defensively deleting what is no longer needed.
Limited reporting capabilities in Purview.
However, whilst Purview delivers powerful retention capabilities, it offers almost no visibility into how those capabilities are performing across the organisation. Business and information governance teams are left asking basic questions they simply cannot answer:
- Which sites, teams, and mailboxes are actually using retention labels?
- Where is adoption lagging?
- Which items are approaching disposition?
- Are reviewers completing their decisions on time?
- Can we demonstrate compliance to auditors without manually exporting CSVs?
Purview’s native reporting only shows items from retention labels that require a review before deletion. It does not show anything for retention labels that autodelete (most labels) after a fixed retention period with no review. In other words, it is not possible to:
- See what is about to be deleted
- See what was deleted
- Give site owners visibility of what is coming up for disposal in their site or provide any automated notifications relating to disposition events
- Demonstrate compliance without manual audit log mining
- Monitor whether lifecycle management is happening as it should
There is no reporting, no upcoming-events view and no audit dashboard beyond the raw audit logs.
You can’t manage what you can’t see!
Reporting plays a key role in any successful DLM programme – without it, you are effectively “driving blind” making it impossible to surface gaps, drive successful adoption or highlight areas where training or remediation is needed. Stakeholders need it too. Senior executives want to see evidence of compliance for assurance purposes and to see their return on investment. Information asset owners need it to ensure accountabilities are clear and where they need to focus their efforts to address gaps.
Reporting is essential for transparency. For example, for knowing what is retained, deleted or left unmanaged and pin pointing risks such as oversharing, identifying redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) information or unmanaged content where remediation is required. Without adequate reporting an organisation cannot:
- Prove compliance: e.g. demonstrate to an auditor what has been retained, what has been deleted or who approved disposition. Purview does store this data, but it is difficult to surface in a useable way.
- Drive adoption: e.g. show to the business areas what is happening to their content, what is coming up for disposal and where they need to act. It is very difficult to drive the necessary behaviours without clear data to show where the gaps are.
- Manage risk: e.g. identity high risk areas where no retention labels are applied or where large volumes of ROT are adding to storage cost and compliance risk.
In practice, the absence of detailed reporting will impact the ability for the DLM programme to set clear data driven objectives and demonstrate measurable success. Risk can accumulate without organisations having visibility of it and information governance teams can spend hours manually exporting, reconciling, and explaining data. It’s like driving a car with no dashboard – you have no idea about how fast, how safe or which direction you are going!
Infotection-ARM can help
Infotechtion-ARM provides the control layer to help organisations “drive” Microsoft Purview in the direction they want to go! By giving insights about data compliance across the M365 and other managed data sources against established KPIs, information governance teams and business owners have the visibility they need to run lifecycle management confidently and defensibly. It can also save costs by identifying redundant, obsolete, trivial information which can be removed / archived to optimize storage and improve compliance.
Infotechtion-ARM supports DLM in Purview in several keyways:
- End to end retention and disposition reporting including full visibility of what is labelled and not labelled, what is approaching disposition, what has been disposed and when it happened. All in one place, no manual exports required.
- Adoption dashboards that drive behaviour such as areas with low label usage and areas of poor governance.
- Identify Data access insights providing focus on scenarios detected as high-risk / over-exposed.
- Detailed insights for disposition reviewers to facilitate actionable disposition processes.
- Audit ready compliance reporting such as disposition logs, retention outcomes and decision trails – no more relying on extracted CVS files.
- Spotlight on data in ‘organization area’ which requires attention to improve maturity, governance and alignment with policies and procedures.
Designed for stakeholders across the organisation
Infotechtion- ARM turns Purview DLM into a sustainable, repeatable, measurable business process that stakeholders can engage with and support. Site owners get clear dashboards showing label coverage, information governance teams get adoption metrics and ROT insights and executives get high-level compliance KPIs and programme performance metrics.
Automated and aligned with Purview, Infotechtion– ARM pulls data directly from M365 and presents in a user-friendly way.
Infotecthion-ARM v Microsoft Purview Native
| Capability | Purview Native | Purview + Infotechtion-ARM |
| Site-level reporting | ❌ | ✅ |
| Business-friendly dashboards | ❌ | ✅ |
| ROT identification | Limited | Comprehensive |
| Deletion evidence | Partial | Full audit-ready |
| Adoption tracking | Manual | Automated |
| SupportingStakeholder engagement | Low | High |
| Executive KPIs | ❌ | ✅ |
Infotechtion-ARM to Embrace and Extend Microsoft Purview
Purview provides the essential components for DLM but without detailed easily accessible reporting, organizations cannot steer, measure or prove compliance. Infotection- ARM extends Microsoft Purview into a sustainable transparent platform to manage data at scale . Organizations can discover, classify, protect & manage data lifecycle across multiple workloads in the cloud (and on premise) with clear visibility at any point in time.
See Infotechtion-ARM in Action?
If you want to see how Infotecthion-ARM can accelerate your Purview adoption. Book your demo today.
