Data Governance for Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 contains vast amounts of sensitive business data across Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and other applications, making data exposure and unauthorized access significant security risks. Common risks include overshared files, excessive permissions, misconfigured access controls, external sharing, compromised accounts, insider threats, and sensitive data being accessed or shared without appropriate protection.

The challenge is understanding not just where data resides, but what information is sensitive, who can access it, how it is being shared, and whether that access is appropriate. Permissions and sharing relationships can become increasingly complex as users, groups, applications, and business requirements change.

Microsoft 365 provides extensive native security, governance, and compliance controls, but effective data protection also requires continuous visibility into the data those controls are protecting. Concentric AI complements Microsoft 365 security by continuously discovering and understanding sensitive data, analyzing access and exposure risks, and identifying excessive permissions and inappropriate sharing.

This data-centric approach helps security teams prioritize the highest-risk exposures, enforce least-privilege access, and reduce sensitive data exposure across Microsoft 365 and the broader enterprise.

Microsoft Purview provides important data governance, classification, compliance, and protection capabilities for Microsoft 365, but it may not be enough to fully protect sensitive data on its own. Purview relies on predefined policies, classifiers, and, for some custom classification scenarios, sample content to train models. This can require significant effort to achieve the accuracy and context needed for complex enterprise data environments.

Concentric AI complements Microsoft Purview with context-aware data discovery and classification that does not require organizations to manually provide large volumes of sample documents. Its patented language models understand the meaning and context of data across Microsoft 365 and other SaaS, cloud, and on-premises environments, helping security teams identify sensitive data, uncover exposure, prioritize risk, and automate remediation.

Together, Microsoft Purview and Concentric AI provide broader visibility, deeper data context, and more effective protection for sensitive data across the enterprise.

To prevent sensitive data from leaking in Microsoft 365, organizations should first identify and classify sensitive information, understand who can access and share it, and then apply appropriate data loss prevention (DLP), access, and sharing controls. Microsoft Purview provides many of these capabilities, but effective protection depends on having accurate, context-rich information about the data being protected.

Concentric AI helps strengthen Microsoft 365 data protection by continuously discovering and understanding sensitive data across SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and other enterprise data sources. Its context-aware approach identifies sensitive information and risky exposure—including excessive permissions, inappropriate sharing, and data that should no longer be accessible—and enables organizations to automatically remediate those risks.

By combining Concentric AI's data discovery, classification, risk analysis, and remediation with Microsoft Purview's DLP and compliance controls, security teams can reduce data leakage while maintaining the productivity and collaboration capabilities of Microsoft 365.

To monitor and manage permissions across SharePoint and OneDrive, organizations should regularly identify who has access to sensitive data, understand how that access is granted, and remove unnecessary or excessive permissions. This includes monitoring direct access, group and inherited permissions, external sharing, and publicly accessible links.

Microsoft Purview can help organizations apply governance and compliance policies across Microsoft 365, but it does not always provide the data-centric context needed to determine whether a user's access is appropriate for the information they can access.

Concentric AI provides continuous visibility into sensitive data and the identities that can access it across SharePoint, OneDrive, and other enterprise data sources. By analyzing data sensitivity, user access, sharing activity, and exposure risk together, Concentric AI helps security teams identify excessive or inappropriate permissions and automatically remediate access risks.

This data-centric approach helps organizations enforce least-privilege access while reducing the risk of sensitive information being exposed through SharePoint and OneDrive.

The compliance frameworks that apply to data in Microsoft 365 depend on your industry, location, and the types of sensitive information your organization collects and processes. Common frameworks and regulations include GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, CCPA/CPRA, and NIST, as well as industry-specific and regional requirements.

Microsoft Purview provides data classification, governance, retention, auditing, and compliance capabilities that can help organizations meet regulatory requirements across Microsoft 365. However, compliance requires more than applying policies—it also requires knowing where sensitive data resides, who can access it, how it is being shared, and whether it is appropriately protected.

Concentric AI complements Microsoft Purview by continuously discovering and understanding sensitive data across Microsoft 365 and other SaaS, cloud, and on-premises environments. By providing context around data sensitivity, access, exposure, and risk, Concentric AI helps organizations identify potential compliance gaps, reduce unnecessary data exposure, and maintain appropriate controls as data changes.

Together, Concentric AI and Microsoft Purview provide the visibility, classification, governance, and protection organizations need to manage sensitive data and support compliance across the enterprise.