Purview integration - Where does the file content get scanned?

[Charles1575]

Hello,

We are located in Canada, there are no instances of MDA in Canada as far as I know. So we have an instance of MDA running in the USA for our tenant. If we enable purview information protection to get sensitivity label information into MDA, where is the file content going to be scanned? Are the files going to be copied temporarily in the USA to get scanned for sensitivity label information or is the file scanning going to be done in Canada?

Thanks.

[#2]

Hi @Charles1575  The scanning is typically done "in-place", meaning it scans the data where it resides without moving the actual content. The metadata might be sent to Purview's catalog though. If I understand you right your actual content of a file remains in its original location (e.g., Canada) during the scanning process.
Mathias

[#3]

Would you know if this is mentioned somewhere in Microsoft's documentation?

@Keith_Fleming : Would you be able to confirm what @techtalk_nu mentioned above in his reply?

We have strict data residency requirements but we would like to be able to leverage this purview integration.

Thanks.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Charles1575,

Generally with this integration we would extract the file content from the datacenter where MDA is located and then check with DCS to understand the what sensitive content is included, then discard it.  For the file itself we only store the metadata in MDA.

That being said, anytime you are looking for 1st party scenarios I would suggest looking into Purview first and then use MDA to cover edge cases such as admin quarantine and scanning specific folders for instance.