Security as the core primitive - Securing AI agents and apps
This week at Microsoft Ignite, we shared our vision for Microsoft security -- In the agentic era, security must be ambient and autonomous, like the AI it protects. It must be woven into and around everything we build—from silicon to OS, to agents, apps, data, platforms, and clouds—and throughout everything we do. In this blog, we are going to dive deeper into many of the new innovations we are introducing this week to secure AI agents and apps. As I spend time with our customers and partners, there are four consistent themes that have emerged as core security challenges to secure AI workloads. These are: preventing agent sprawl and access to resources, protecting against data oversharing and data leaks, defending against new AI threats and vulnerabilities, and adhering to evolving regulations. Addressing these challenges holistically requires a coordinated effort across IT, developers, and security leaders, not just within security teams and to enable this, we are introducing several new innovations: Microsoft Agent 365 for IT, Foundry Control Plane in Microsoft Foundry for developers, and the Security Dashboard for AI for security leaders. In addition, we are releasing several new purpose-built capabilities to protect and govern AI apps and agents across Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview. Observability at every layer of the stack To facilitate the organization-wide effort that it takes to secure and govern AI agents and apps – IT, developers, and security leaders need observability (security, management, and monitoring) at every level. IT teams need to enable the development and deployment of any agent in their environment. To ensure the responsible and secure deployment of agents into an organization, IT needs a unified agent registry, the ability to assign an identity to every agent, manage the agent’s access to data and resources, and manage the agent’s entire lifecycle. In addition, IT needs to be able to assign access to common productivity and collaboration tools, such as email and file storage, and be able to observe their entire agent estate for risks such as over-permissioned agents. Development teams need to build and test agents, apply security and compliance controls by default, and ensure AI models are evaluated for safety guardrails and security vulnerabilities. Post deployment, development teams must observe agents to ensure they are staying on task, accessing applications and data sources appropriately, and operating within their cost and performance expectations. Security & compliance teams must ensure overall security of their AI estate, including their AI infrastructure, platforms, data, apps, and agents. They need comprehensive visibility into all their security risks- including agent sprawl and resource access, data oversharing and leaks, AI threats and vulnerabilities, and complying with global regulations. They want to address these risks by extending their existing security investments that they are already invested in and familiar with, rather than using siloed or bolt-on tools. These teams can be most effective in delivering trustworthy AI to their organizations if security is natively integrated into the tools and platforms that they use every day, and if those tools and platforms share consistent security primitives such as agent identities from Entra; data security and compliance controls from Purview; and security posture, detections, and protections from Defender. With the new capabilities being released today, we are delivering observability at every layer of the AI stack, meeting IT, developers, and security teams where they are in the tools they already use to innovate with confidence. For IT Teams - Introducing Microsoft Agent 365, the control plane for agents, now in preview The best infrastructure for managing your agents is the one you already use to manage your users. With Agent 365, organizations can extend familiar tools and policies to confidently deploy and secure agents, without reinventing the wheel. By using the same trusted Microsoft 365 infrastructure, productivity apps, and protections, organizations can now apply consistent and familiar governance and security controls that are purpose-built to protect against agent-specific threats and risks. gement and governance of agents across organizations Microsoft Agent 365 delivers a unified agent Registry, Access Control, Visualization, Interoperability, and Security capabilities for your organization. These capabilities work together to help organizations manage agents and drive business value. The Registry powered by the Entra provides a complete and unified inventory of all the agents deployed and used in your organization including both Microsoft and third-party agents. Access Control allows you to limit the access privileges of your agents to only the resources that they need and protect their access to resources in real time. Visualization gives organizations the ability to see what matters most and gain insights through a unified dashboard, advanced analytics, and role-based reporting. Interop allows agents to access organizational data through Work IQ for added context, and to integrate with Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook, Word, and Excel so they can create and collaborate alongside users. Security enables the proactive detection of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, protects against common attacks such as prompt injections, prevents agents from processing or leaking sensitive data, and gives organizations the ability to audit agent interactions, assess compliance readiness and policy violations, and recommend controls for evolving regulatory requirements. Microsoft Agent 365 also includes the Agent 365 SDK, part of Microsoft Agent Framework, which empowers developers and ISVs to build agents on their own AI stack. The SDK enables agents to automatically inherit Microsoft's security and governance protections, such as identity controls, data security policies, and compliance capabilities, without the need for custom integration. For more details on Agent 365, read the blog here. For Developers - Introducing Microsoft Foundry Control Plane to observe, secure and manage agents, now in preview Developers are moving fast to bring agents into production, but operating them at scale introduces new challenges and responsibilities. Agents can access tools, take actions, and make decisions in real time, which means development teams must ensure that every agent behaves safely, securely, and consistently. Today, developers need to work across multiple disparate tools to get a holistic picture of the cybersecurity and safety risks that their agents may have. Once they understand the risk, they then need a unified and simplified way to monitor and manage their entire agent fleet and apply controls and guardrails as needed. Microsoft Foundry provides a unified platform for developers to build, evaluate and deploy AI apps and agents in a responsible way. Today we are excited to announce that Foundry Control Plane is available in preview. This enables developers to observe, secure, and manage their agent fleets with built-in security, and centralized governance controls. With this unified approach, developers can now identify risks and correlate disparate signals across their models, agents, and tools; enforce consistent policies and quality gates; and continuously monitor task adherence and runtime risks. Foundry Control Plane is deeply integrated with Microsoft’s security portfolio to provide a ‘secure by design’ foundation for developers. With Microsoft Entra, developers can ensure an agent identity (Agent ID) and access controls are built into every agent, mitigating the risk of unmanaged agents and over permissioned resources. With Microsoft Defender built in, developers gain contextualized alerts and posture recommendations for agents directly within the Foundry Control Plane. This integration proactively prevents configuration and access risks, while also defending agents from runtime threats in real time. Microsoft Purview’s native integration into Foundry Control Plane makes it easy to enable data security and compliance for every Foundry-built application or agent. This allows Purview to discover data security and compliance risks and apply policies to prevent user prompts and AI responses from safety and policy violations. In addition, agent interactions can be logged and searched for compliance and legal audits. This integration of the shared security capabilities, including identity and access, data security and compliance, and threat protection and posture ensures that security is not an afterthought; it’s embedded at every stage of the agent lifecycle, enabling you to start secure and stay secure. For more details, read the blog. For Security Teams - Introducing Security Dashboard for AI - unified risk visibility for CISOs and AI risk leaders, coming soon AI proliferation in the enterprise, combined with the emergence of AI governance committees and evolving AI regulations, leaves CISOs and AI risk leaders needing a clear view of their AI risks, such as data leaks, model vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and unethical agent actions across their entire AI estate, spanning AI platforms, apps, and agents. 90% of security professionals, including CISOs, report that their responsibilities have expanded to include data governance and AI oversight within the past year. 1 At the same time, 86% of risk managers say disconnected data and systems lead to duplicated efforts and gaps in risk coverage. 2 To address these needs, we are excited to introduce the Security Dashboard for AI. This serves as a unified dashboard that aggregates posture and real-time risk signals from Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview. This unified dashboard allows CISOs and AI risk leaders to discover agents and AI apps, track AI posture and drift, and correlate risk signals to investigate and act across their entire AI ecosystem. For example, you can see your full AI inventory and get visibility into a quarantined agent, flagged for high data risk due to oversharing sensitive information in Purview. The dashboard then correlates that signal with identity insights from Entra and threat protection alerts from Defender to provide a complete picture of exposure. From there, you can delegate tasks to the appropriate teams to enforce policies and remediate issues quickly. With the Security Dashboard for AI, CISOs and risk leaders gain a clear, consolidated view of AI risks across agents, apps, and platforms—eliminating fragmented visibility, disconnected posture insights, and governance gaps as AI adoption scales. Best of all, there’s nothing new to buy. If you’re already using Microsoft security products to secure AI, you’re already a Security Dashboard for AI customer. Figure 5: Security Dashboard for AI provides CISOs and AI risk leaders with a unified view of their AI risk by bringing together their AI inventory, AI risk, and security recommendations to strengthen overall posture Together, these innovations deliver observability and security across IT, development, and security teams, powered by Microsoft’s shared security capabilities. With Microsoft Agent 365, IT teams can manage and secure agents alongside users. Foundry Control Plane gives developers unified governance and lifecycle controls for agent fleets. Security Dashboard for AI provides CISOs and AI risk leaders with a consolidated view of AI risks across platforms, apps, and agents. Added innovation to secure and govern your AI workloads In addition to the IT, developer, and security leader-focused innovations outlined above, we continue to accelerate our pace of innovation in Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Defender to address the most pressing needs for securing and governing your AI workloads. These needs are: Manage agent sprawl and resource access e.g. managing agent identity, access to resources, and permissions lifecycle at scale Prevent data oversharing and leaks e.g. protecting sensitive information shared in prompts, responses, and agent interactions Defend against shadow AI, new threats, and vulnerabilities e.g. managing unsanctioned applications, preventing prompt injection attacks, and detecting AI supply chain vulnerabilities Enable AI governance for regulatory compliance e.g. ensuring AI development, operations, and usage comply with evolving global regulations and frameworks Manage agent sprawl and resource access 76% of business leaders expect employees to manage agents within the next 2–3 years. 3 Widespread adoption of agents is driving the need for visibility and control, which includes the need for a unified registry, agent identities, lifecycle governance, and secure access to resources. Today, Microsoft Entra provides robust identity protection and secure access for applications and users. However, organizations lack a unified way to manage, govern, and protect agents in the same way they manage their users. Organizations need a purpose-built identity and access framework for agents. Introducing Microsoft Entra Agent ID, now in preview Microsoft Entra Agent ID offers enterprise-grade capabilities that enable organizations to prevent agent sprawl and protect agent identities and their access to resources. These new purpose-built capabilities enable organizations to: Register and manage agents: Get a complete inventory of the agent fleet and ensure all new agents are created with an identity built-in and are automatically protected by organization policies to accelerate adoption. Govern agent identities and lifecycle: Keep the agent fleet under control with lifecycle management and IT-defined guardrails for both agents and people who create and manage them. Protect agent access to resources: Reduce risk of breaches, block risky agents, and prevent agent access to malicious resources with conditional access and traffic inspection. Agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, and Security Copilot get an Entra Agent ID built-in at creation. Developers can also adopt Entra Agent ID for agents they build through Microsoft Agent Framework, Microsoft Agent 365 SDK, or Microsoft Entra Agent ID SDK. Read the Microsoft Entra blog to learn more. Prevent data oversharing and leaks Data security is more complex than ever. Information Security Media Group (ISMG) reports that 80% of leaders cite leakage of sensitive data as their top concern. 4 In addition to data security and compliance risks of generative AI (GenAI) apps, agents introduces new data risks such as unsupervised data access, highlighting the need to protect all types of corporate data, whether it is accessed by employees or agents. To mitigate these risks, we are introducing new Microsoft Purview data security and compliance capabilities for Microsoft 365 Copilot and for agents and AI apps built with Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry, providing unified protection, visibility, and control for users, AI Apps, and Agents. New Microsoft Purview controls safeguard Microsoft 365 Copilot with real-time protection and bulk remediation of oversharing risks Microsoft Purview and Microsoft 365 Copilot deliver a fully integrated solution for protecting sensitive data in AI workflows. Based on ongoing customer feedback, we’re introducing new capabilities to deliver real-time protection for sensitive data in M365 Copilot and accelerated remediation of oversharing risks: Data risk assessments: Previously, admins could monitor oversharing risks such as SharePoint sites with unprotected sensitive data. Now, they can perform item-level investigations and bulk remediation for overshared files in SharePoint and OneDrive to quickly reduce oversharing exposure. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for M365 Copilot: DLP previously excluded files with sensitivity labels from Copilot processing. Now in preview, DLP also prevents prompts that include sensitive data from being processed in M365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, and Copilot agents, and prevents Copilot from using sensitive data in prompts for web grounding. Priority cleanup for M365 Copilot assets: Many organizations have org-wide policies to retain or delete data. Priority cleanup, now generally available, lets admins delete assets that are frequently processed by Copilot, such as meeting transcripts and recordings, on an independent schedule from the org-wide policies while maintaining regulatory compliance. On-demand classification for meeting transcripts: Purview can now detect sensitive information in meeting transcripts on-demand. This enables data security admins to apply DLP policies and enforce Priority cleanup based on the sensitive information detected. & bulk remediation Read the full Data Security blog to learn more. Introducing new Microsoft Purview data security capabilities for agents and apps built with Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry, now in preview Microsoft Purview now extends the same data security and compliance for users and Copilots to agents and apps. These new capabilities are: Enhanced Data Security Posture Management: A centralized DSPM dashboard that provides observability, risk assessment, and guided remediation across users, AI apps, and agents. Insider Risk Management (IRM) for Agents: Uniquely designed for agents, using dedicated behavioral analytics, Purview dynamically assigns risk levels to agents based on their risky handing of sensitive data and enables admins to apply conditional policies based on that risk level. Sensitive data protection with Azure AI Search: Azure AI Search enables fast, AI-driven retrieval across large document collections, essential for building AI Apps. When apps or agents use Azure AI Search to index or retrieve data, Purview sensitivity labels are preserved in the search index, ensuring that any sensitive information remains protected under the organization’s data security & compliance policies. For more information on preventing data oversharing and data leaks - Learn how Purview protects and governs agents in the Data Security and Compliance for Agents blog. Defend against shadow AI, new threats, and vulnerabilities AI workloads are subject to new AI-specific threats like prompt injections attacks, model poisoning, and data exfiltration of AI generated content. Although security admins and SOC analysts have similar tasks when securing agents, the attack methods and surfaces differ significantly. To help customers defend against these novel attacks, we are introducing new capabilities in Microsoft Defender that deliver end-to-end protection, from security posture management to runtime defense. Introducing Security Posture Management for agents, now in preview As organizations adopt AI agents to automate critical workflows, they become high-value targets and potential points of compromise, creating a critical need to ensure agents are hardened, compliant, and resilient by preventing misconfigurations and safeguarding against adversarial manipulation. Security Posture Management for agents in Microsoft Defender now provides an agent inventory for security teams across Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio agents. Here, analysts can assess the overall security posture of an agent, easily implement security recommendations, and identify vulnerabilities such as misconfigurations and excessive permissions, all aligned to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Additionally, the new agent attack path analysis visualizes how an agent’s weak security posture can create broader organizational risk, so you can quickly limit exposure and prevent lateral movement. Introducing Threat Protection for agents, now in preview Attack techniques and attack surfaces for agents are fundamentally different from other assets in your environment. That’s why Defender is delivering purpose-built protections and detections to help defend against them. Defender is introducing runtime protection for Copilot Studio agents that automatically block prompt injection attacks in real time. In addition, we are announcing agent-specific threat detections for Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry agents coming soon. Defender automatically correlates these alerts with Microsoft’s industry-leading threat intelligence and cross-domain security signals to deliver richer, contextualized alerts and security incident views for the SOC analyst. Defender’s risk and threat signals are natively integrated into the new Microsoft Foundry Control Plane, giving development teams full observability and the ability to act directly from within their familiar environment. Finally, security analysts will be able to hunt across all agent telemetry in the Advanced Hunting experience in Defender, and the new Agent 365 SDK extends Defender’s visibility and hunting capabilities to third-party agents, starting with Genspark and Kasisto, giving security teams even more coverage across their AI landscape. To learn more about how you can harden the security posture of your agents and defend against threats, read the Microsoft Defender blog. Enable AI governance for regulatory compliance Global AI regulations like the EU AI Act and NIST AI RMF are evolving rapidly; yet, according to ISMG, 55% of leaders report lacking clarity on current and future AI regulatory requirements. 5 As enterprises adopt AI, they must ensure that their AI innovation aligns with global regulations and standards to avoid costly compliance gaps. Introducing new Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager capabilities to stay ahead of evolving AI regulations, now in preview Today, Purview Compliance Manager provides over 300 pre-built assessments for common industry, regional, and global standards and regulations. However, the pace of change for new AI regulations requires controls to be continuously re-evaluated and updated so that organizations can adapt to ongoing changes in regulations and stay compliant. To address this need, Compliance Manager now includes AI-powered regulatory templates. AI-powered regulatory templates enable real-time ingestion and analysis of global regulatory documents, allowing compliance teams to quickly adapt to changes as they happen. As regulations evolve, the updated regulatory documents can be uploaded to Compliance Manager, and the new requirements are automatically mapped to applicable recommended actions to implement controls across Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Foundry. Automated actions by Compliance Manager further streamline governance, reduce manual workload, and strengthen regulatory accountability. Introducing expanded Microsoft Purview compliance capabilities for agents and AI apps now in preview Microsoft Purview now extends its compliance capabilities across agent-generated interactions, ensuring responsible use and regulatory alignment as AI becomes deeply embedded across business processes. New capabilities include expanded coverage for: Audit: Surface agent interactions, lifecycle events, and data usage with Purview Audit. Unified audit logs across user and agent activities, paired with traceability for every agent using an Entra Agent ID, support investigation, anomaly detection, and regulatory reporting. Communication Compliance: Detect prompts sent to agents and agent-generated responses containing inappropriate, unethical, or risky language, including attempts to manipulate agents into bypassing policies, generating risky content, or producing noncompliant outputs. When issues arise, data security admins get full context, including the prompt, the agent’s output, and relevant metadata, so they can investigate and take corrective action Data Lifecycle Management: Apply retention and deletion policies to agent-generated content and communication flows to automate lifecycle controls and reduce regulatory risk. Read about Microsoft Purview data security for agents to learn more. Finally, we are extending our data security, threat protection, and identity access capabilities to third-party apps and agents via the network. Advancing Microsoft Entra Internet Access Secure Web + AI Gateway - extend runtime protections to the network, now in preview Microsoft Entra Internet Access, part of the Microsoft Entra Suite, has new capabilities to secure access to and usage of GenAI at the network level, marking a transition from Secure Web Gateway to Secure Web and AI Gateway. Enterprises can accelerate GenAI adoption while maintaining compliance and reducing risk, empowering employees to experiment with new AI tools safely. The new capabilities include: Prompt injection protection which blocks malicious prompts in real time by extending Azure AI Prompt Shields to the network layer. Network file filtering which extends Microsoft Purview to inspect files in transit and prevents regulated or confidential data from being uploaded to unsanctioned AI services. Shadow AI Detection that provides visibility into unsanctioned AI applications through Cloud Application Analytics and Defender for Cloud Apps risk scoring, empowering security teams to monitor usage trends, apply Conditional Access, or block high-risk apps instantly. Unsanctioned MCP server blocking prevents access to MCP servers from unauthorized agents. With these controls, you can accelerate GenAI adoption while maintaining compliance and reducing risk, so employees can experiment with new AI tools safely. Read the Microsoft Entra blog to learn more. As AI transforms the enterprise, security must evolve to meet new challenges—spanning agent sprawl, data protection, emerging threats, and regulatory compliance. Our approach is to empower IT, developers, and security leaders with purpose-built innovations like Agent 365, Foundry Control Plane, and the Security Dashboard for AI. These solutions bring observability, governance, and protection to every layer of the AI stack, leveraging familiar tools and integrated controls across Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Purview. The future of security is ambient, autonomous, and deeply woven into the fabric of how we build, deploy, and govern AI systems. Explore additional resources Learn more about Security for AI solutions on our webpage Learn more about Microsoft Agent 365 Learn more about Microsoft Entra Agent ID Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot Get started with Microsoft Copilot Studio Get started with Microsoft Foundry Get started with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Get started with Microsoft Entra Get started with Microsoft Purview Get started with Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager Sign up for a free Microsoft 365 E5 Security Trial and Microsoft Purview Trial 1 Bedrock Security, 2025 Data Security Confidence Index, published Mar 17, 2025. 2 AuditBoard & Ascend2, Connected Risk Report 2024; as cited by MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2025. 3 KPMG AI Quarterly Pulse Survey | Q3 2025. September 2025. n= 130 U.S.-based C-suite and business leaders representing organizations with annual revenue of $1 billion or more 4 First Annual Generative AI study: Business Rewards vs. Security Risks, , Q3 2023, ISMG, N=400 5 First Annual Generative AI study: Business Rewards vs. Security Risks, Q3 2023, ISMG, N=400Building layered protection: New Microsoft Purview data security controls for the browser & network
Microsoft is committed to helping our customers protect their data wherever it lives or travels - even as the modern data estate grows more complex. Over the years, we have taken a uniquely seamless approach of building protections directly where data is stored, used, or moves, helping customers get up and running easily without compromising on coverage. Our journey started with native integration of Purview data security controls into Microsoft 365 apps and services. This built-in design enables us to secure data right where most of your organization’s productivity takes place, without added latency or onboarding. This principle has continued with built-in controls for Teams, PowerBI, Fabric, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. We have also extended protections to Windows and macOS endpoint devices using a differentiated, agentless model that delivers visibility and control without deployment headaches or heavy on-premises footprint. However, the nature of modern work is continuously evolving: Generative AI tools are increasingly ubiquitous in the digital workplace and information workers are spending more time working in the browser than ever before [1]. As such, we are once again evolving our solutions to the modern AI era by extending Purview data security capabilities to the network layer and Microsoft Edge for Business. These capabilities include: Inline discovery of sensitive data across the network through secure access service edge (SASE) integration Inline discovery & protection of sensitive data in Edge for Business Data security controls for unmanaged Windows & macOS devices using Edge for Business When combined with existing Purview protections across cloud, email, and endpoints, the new browser and network controls empower teams to build a layered strategy for data protection that scales with the pace and complexity of today’s data ecosystems. To see layered protection in action, watch our latest Mechanics video: Introducing inline data discovery for the network Historically, Microsoft Purview has possessed the ability to allow or block the use of sensitive data within specified applications through our cloud and endpoint data loss prevention (DLP) solutions. As users interact with a wider variety of cloud-connected apps & services throughout the day – such as unmanaged SaaS apps, personal cloud storage services, and consumer GenAI apps – organizations need greater oversight over sensitive data that is being sent outside of the trusted boundaries of the organization. Today, we are excited to share that Microsoft Purview is opening its best-in-class data classification and data loss prevention policies to an ecosystem of secure access service edge (SASE) solutions. Integrating Purview with your SASE technology of choice enables you to secure sensitive data at the network layer using the same tools and workflows you rely on every day. This approach also enables you to extend Purview inspection, classification and ability to make policy verdicts to data in unmanaged, 3rd party locations, all at the speed & scale of the cloud. Users won’t have their pace and productivity disrupted as policies await decisions from on-premises classification systems, and admins can intercept sensitive data before it's leaked to risky destinations. Alongside us for the start of this journey are Netskope, a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for SSE and SASE, iboss, a Leader in the IDC ZTNA MarketScape, and Palo Alto Networks, a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for SSE and SASE. We are excited to announce that inline discovery of sensitive data will be available in public preview early May through the Netskope One SSE and iboss Zero Trust SASE integrations. The integration with Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access for inline discovery will be available later this year. The list of supported SASE partners will continue to expand in the coming months. Through these joint solutions, we can help our customers see greater value from bringing together best-of-breed data security and network visibility. "As insider threats rise and adversaries leverage AI, large enterprises are strengthening their security strategies by integrating insights from diverse tools. Netskope’s seamless integration with Microsoft Purview tackles these evolving challenges head-on, enhancing data protection and ensuring classified information remains secure." – Siva VRS, Wipro, Vice President & Global Business Unit Head, Cyber Security Practices Securing risky data interactions through SASE integration Through the upcoming Netskope and iboss integrations, your SASE solution will provide visibility into network traffic originating from managed devices to potentially untrusted locations. These interactions can be initiated from desktop applications such as the ChatGPT desktop app, cloud file sync apps like Box, and even non-Microsoft browsers such as Opera or Brave. Examples of common but potentially risky interactions include: Intentional or inadvertent exfiltration of sensitive company data to a personal or 3rd party instance of an application: For example, an employee is working with a partner outside of their organization on an upcoming project via the Slack desktop application. If the employee sends sensitive data to that 3rd party Slack channel, such as customer account numbers or contact information, this event will be captured in Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and Activity Explorer, and the admin can dive deeper into the sensitive data that was exfiltrated & its destination: Use of unsanctioned generative AI applications or plugins: Some employees in your organization may have installed an unsanctioned GPT plugin for their Microsoft Word application, for example. If they prompt the plugin to summarize the contents of the Confidential merger & acquisition document that is open, this prompt will also be captured in Purview DSPM for AI. Learn more about inline discovery of sensitive data in GenAI applications in this blog. Detection & discovery of these events provide data security admins invaluable insight into how sensitive data is leaving trusted locations through the network, even before policies are ever created. From Purview DSPM, admins can better understand how the sensitive data detected in network activity contributes to their organizational risk, such as the top applications to which users send sensitive data, and the types of data that are most frequently exfiltrated. Even better, DSPM provides proactive policy recommendations for controls that can help address this risk. Additionally, admins have the option to leverage Activity Explorer to drill down into specific egress points and destinations of sensitive data to better inform their protection strategy. Visibility of sensitive data in motion not only gives admins insight into how to improve their data loss prevention strategy, but also broadens their aperture of activities that could indicate potentially risky behavior by users. In the coming months, these new network signals will unlock a new category of policy indicators in Purview Insider Risk Management. Indicators for user activities such as file uploads or AI prompt submissions detected through the network will help Insider Risk Management formulate richer and comprehensive profiles of user risk. In turn, these signals will also better contextualize future data interactions and enrich policy verdicts. Introducing inline data protection in Edge for Business Every day, your employees interact with data across a variety of web applications & services. Chances are, some of this data is sensitive or proprietary for the organization. For that reason, it’s growing increasingly critical to have visibility and control over how employees interact with sensitive data within the browser. Today, we are excited to announce two new capabilities that represent significant strides in our growing set of native data security controls for Edge for Business, the secure enterprise browser optimized for AI: inline data protection and data security controls for unmanaged devices. With the new inline protection capability for Edge for Business, available in public preview in the coming weeks, you can prevent data leakage across the various ways that users interact with sensitive data in the browser, including typing of text directly into a web application or generative AI prompt. Inline protection is built natively into Edge for Business, meaning it can be enabled even without endpoint DLP deployed, and complements existing endpoint DLP protections for uploading or pasting sensitive content to the browser. Starting with some of the top consumer GenAI apps (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek), admins will be able to block typed prompts containing sensitive data. This list will continuously expand to support a broad range of unmanaged apps, including additional genAI, email, collaboration, and social media apps. In the example below, you can see how a Purview DLP policy can block a user from submitting a prompt containing sensitive M&A details to Google Gemini for summarization: Inline protection can also leverage Adaptive Protection policy conditions for activities in GenAI apps. This enables data security admins to tailor the level of enforcement to the risk level of the user interacting with the data, minimizing disruption to day-to-day AI usage. For example, Adaptive Protection can enable admins to block low-risk users from submitting prompts containing the highest-sensitivity classifiers for their organization, such as M&A-related data or intellectual property, while blocking prompts containing any sensitive information type (SIT) for an elevated-risk user. To bring this full circle, risky prompts sent to GenAI apps or responses containing sensitive information can also raise a user’s risk level through risky AI usage detections in Insider Risk Management. This helps organizations understand and adapt to how insiders are interacting with data in AI apps. Similarly to inline data discovery for the network, visibility into sensitive data use in Edge for Business will now surface in Purview DSPM, even if a protection policy has not yet been deployed. If DSPM observes high data exfiltration risk originating from Edge for Business, it will proactively recommend a set of data security policies to mitigate that risk, such as blocking typed sensitive data and sensitive files from being sent to consumer AI apps. Purview data security controls for unmanaged devices In addition to the new inline protection capability, we are thrilled to announce that Purview data security controls now extend to Edge for Business on unmanaged Windows or macOS devices. These data loss prevention policies, rolling out in public preview in the coming weeks, allow organizations to prevent or enable access to data in organizational apps based on the sensitivity of the data, as long as the end user is logged into their Edge for Business profile. This is particularly relevant for organizations that leverage a significant contractor or frontline workforce, or enable bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies. Similarly to inline protection, these controls are built natively into Edge for Business and can be activated even without endpoint DLP deployed. As an example, your organization may allow a contractor to use a personal macOS device to access corporate resources. By opening Edge for Business and logging in using their Entra ID account, Purview data security policies can now be applied to that browser session. If the contractor navigates to a managed app such as Workday or a proprietary line of business app, you can apply context-aware data protections such as allowing download of a benefits brochure that does not contain any sensitive information, but preventing download of employee or patient records that contain sensitive data. This context-aware policy helps organizations balance adequate data security controls with end user productivity. To learn more about security capabilities built into Edge for Business, the secure enterprise browser, visit the blog. Licensing details Inline data discovery via 3rd party network integrations: Your global admin will be able to enable this capability by activating Purview pay-as-you-go meters. Pricing will be based on the number of requests captured through network traffic within the scope of a policy. E5, E5 Compliance, and E5 Information Protection & Governance required. Additional pricing details will be available with public preview rollout in early May. Inline discovery & protection in Edge for Business: [Revision Nov. 2025] Inline data protection in Edge for Business is now a pay-as-you-go capability. Your global admin will be able to enable this capability by activating Purview pay-as-you-go meters. Data security controls for unmanaged devices accessing Edge for Business: Included in E5, E5 Compliance, and E5 Information Protection & Governance. Get started You can try Microsoft Purview data security solutions directly in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal with a free trial. Want to learn more about the innovations designed to help your organization protect data, defend against cyber threats, and stay compliant? Hear from Microsoft leaders online at Microsoft Secure on April 9. [1] Internal Windows telemetryEmpowering organizations with integrated data security: What’s new in Microsoft Purview
Today, data moves across clouds, apps, and devices at an unprecedented speed, often outside the visibility of siloed legacy tools. The rise of autonomous agents, generative AI, and distributed data ecosystems means that traditional perimeter-based security models are no longer sufficient. Even though companies are spending more than $213 billion globally, they still face several persistent security challenges: Fragmented tools don’t integrate together well and leave customers lacking full visibility of their data security risks The growing use of AI in the workplace is creating new data risks for companies to manage The shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals is making it difficult to accomplish data security objectives Microsoft is a global leader in cloud, productivity, and security solutions. Microsoft Purview benefits from this breadth of offerings, integrating seamlessly across Microsoft 365, Azure, Microsoft Fabric, and other Microsoft platforms — while also working in harmony with complementary security tools. Unlike fragmented point solutions, Purview delivers an end-to-end data security platform built into the productivity and collaboration tools organizations already rely on. This deep understanding of data within Microsoft environments, combined with continually improving external data risk detections, allows customers to simplify their security stack, increase visibility, and act on data risks more quickly. At Ignite, we’re introducing the next generation of data security — delivering advanced protection and operational efficiency, so security teams can move at business speed while maintaining control of their data. Go beyond visibility into action, across your data estate Many customers today lack a comprehensive view of how to holistically address data security risks and properly manage their data security posture. To help customers strengthen data security across their data estate, we are excited to announce the new, enhanced Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM). This new AI-powered DSPM experience unifies current Purview DSPM and DSPM for AI capabilities to create a central entry point for data security insights and controls, from which organizations can take action to continually improve their data security posture and prioritize risks. The new capabilities in the enhanced DSPM experience are: Outcome-Based workflows: Choose a data security objective and see related metrics, risk patterns, a recommended action plan and its impact - going from insight to action. Expanded coverage and remediation on Data Risk Assessments: Conduct item-level analysis with new remediation actions like bulk disabling of overshared SharePoint links. Out-of-box posture reports: Uncover data protection gaps and track security posture improvements with out-of-box reports that provide rich context on label usage, auto-labeling effectiveness, posture drift through label transitions, and DLP policy activities. AI Observability: Surface an organization’s agent inventory with assigned agent risk level and agent posture metrics based on agentic interactions with the organization’s data. New Security Copilot Agent: Accelerate the discovery and analysis of sensitive data to uncover hidden risks across files, emails, and messages. Gain visibility of non-Microsoft data within your data estate: Enable a unified view of data risks by gaining visibility into Salesforce, Snowflake, Google Cloud Platform, and Databricks – available through integrations with external partners via Microsoft Sentinel. These DSPM enhancements will be available in Public Preview within the upcoming weeks. Learn more in our blog dedicated to the announcement of the new Microsoft Purview DSPM. Together, these innovations reflect a larger shift: data security is no longer about silos—it’s about unified visibility and control everywhere data lives and having a comprehensive understanding of the data estate to detect and prevent data risks. Organizations trust Microsoft for their productivity and security platforms, but their footprint spans across third-party data environments too. That’s why Purview continues to expand protection beyond Microsoft environments. In addition to bringing in 3rd party data into DSPM, we are also expanding auto-labeling to three new Data Map sources, adding to the data sources we previously announced. Currently in public preview, the new sources include Snowflake, SQL Server, and Amazon S3. Once connected to Purview, admins gain an “at-a-glance” view of all data sources and can automatically apply sensitivity labels, enforcing consistent security policies without manual effort. This helps organizations discover sensitive information at scale, reduce the risk of data exposure, and ensure safer AI adoption all while simplifying governance through centralized policy management and visibility across their entire data estate. Enable AI adoption and prevent data oversharing As organizations adopt more autonomous agents, new risks emerge, such as unsupervised data access and creation, cascading agent interactions, and unclear data activity accountability. Besides AI Observability in DSPM providing details on the inventory and risk level of the agents, Purview is expanding its industry-leading data security and compliance capabilities to secure and govern agents that inherit users’ policies and controls, as well as agents that have their own unique IDs, policies, and controls. This includes agent types across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, and third-party platforms. Key enhancements include: Extension of Purview Information Protection and Data Loss Prevention policies to autonomous agents: Scope autonomous agents with an Agent ID into Purview policies that work for users across Microsoft 365 apps, including Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams. Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management for Agents: With dedicated indicators and behavioral analytics to flag specific risky agent activities, enable proactive investigation by assigning risk levels to each agent. Extension of Purview data compliance capabilities to agent interactions: Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance, Data Lifecycle Management, Audit, and eDiscovery extend to agent interactions, supporting responsible use, secure retention, and agentic accountability. Purview SDK embedded in Agent Framework SDK: Purview SDK embedded in Agent Framework SDK enables developers to integrate enterprise-grade security, compliance, and governance into AI agents. It delivers automatic data classification, prevents sensitive data leaks and oversharing, and provides visibility and control for regulatory compliance, empowering secure adoption of AI agents in complex environments. Purview integration with Foundry: Purview is now enabled within Foundry, allowing Foundry admins to activate Microsoft Purview on their subscription. Once enabled, interaction data from all apps and agents flows into Purview for centralized compliance, governance, and posture management of AI data. Azure AI Search honors Purview labels and policies: Azure AI Search now ingests Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels and enforces corresponding protection policies through built-in indexers (SharePoint, OneLake, Azure Blob, ADLS Gen2). This ensures secure, policy-aligned search over enterprise data, enabling agentic RAG scenarios where only authorized documents are returned or sent to LLMs, preventing oversharing and aligning with enterprise data protection standards. Extension of Purview Data Loss Prevention policies to Copilot Mode in Edge for Business: This week, Microsoft Edge for Business introduced Copilot Mode, transforming the browser into a proactive, agentic partner. This is AI-assisted browsing will honor the user’s existing DLP protections, such as endpoint DLP policies that prevent pasting to sensitive service domains, or summarizing sensitive page content. Learn more in our blog dedicated to the announcements of Microsoft Purview for Agents. New capabilities in Microsoft Purview, now in public preview, to help prevent data oversharing and leakage through AI include: Expansion of Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Microsoft 365 Copilot: Previously, we introduced DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot to prevent labeled files & emails from being used as grounding data for responses, therefore reducing the risk of oversharing. Today, we are expanding DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot to safeguard prompts containing sensitive data. This real-time control helps organizations mitigate data leakage and oversharing risks by preventing Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, and Microsoft 365 Copilot agents from returning a response when prompts contain sensitive data or using that sensitive data for grounding in Microsoft 365 or the web. For example, if a user searches, “Can you tell me more about my customer based on their address: 1234 Main Street,” Copilot will both inform the user that organizational policies prevent it from responding to their prompt, as well as block any web queries to Bing for “1234 Main Street.” Enhancements to inline data protection in Edge for Business: Earlier this year, we introduced inline data protection in Edge for Business to prevent sensitive data from being leaked to unmanaged consumer AI apps, starting with ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek. We are not only making this capability generally available for the initial set of AI apps, but also expanding the capability to 30+ new apps in public preview and supporting file upload activity in addition to text. This addresses potential data leakage that can occur when employees send organizational files or data to consumer AI apps for help with work-related tasks, such as document creation or code reviews. Inline data protection for the network: For user activity outside of the browser, we are also enabling inline data protection at the network layer. Earlier this year, we introduced integrations with supported secure service edge (SSE) providers to detect when sensitive data is shared to unmanaged cloud locations, such as consumer AI apps or personal cloud storage, even if sharing occurs outside of the Edge browser. In addition to the discovery of sensitive data, these integrations now support protection controls that block sensitive data from leaving a user device and reaching an unmanaged cloud service or application. These capabilities are now generally available through the Netskope and iboss integrations, and inline data discovery is available in public preview through the Palo Alto Networks integration. Extension of Purview protection to on-device AI: Purview DLP policies now extend to the Recall experience in Copilot+ PC devices to prevent sensitive organizational data from being undesirably captured and retained. Admins can now block Recall snapshots based on sensitivity label or the presence of Purview sensitive information types (SITs) in a document open on the device, or simply honor and display the sensitivity labels of content captured in the Recall snapshot library. For example, a DLP policy can be configured to prevent recall from taking snapshots of any documents labeled “Highly Confidential,” or a product design file that contains intellectual property. Learn more in the Windows IT Pro blog. Best-in-class data security for Microsoft environments Microsoft Purview sets the standard for data security within its own ecosystem. Organizations benefit from unified security policies and seamless compliance controls that are purpose-built for Microsoft environments, ensuring sensitive data remains secure without compromising productivity. We also are constantly investing in expanding protections and controls to Microsoft collaboration tools including SharePoint, Teams, Fabric, Azure and across Microsoft 365. On-demand classification adds meeting transcript coverage and new enhancements: To help organizations protect sensitive data sitting in data-at-rest, on-demand classification now extends to meeting transcripts, enabling the discovery and classification of sensitive information shared in existing recorded meeting transcripts. Once classified, admins can set up DLP or Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) policies to properly protect and retain this data according to organizational policies. This is now generally available, empowering organizations to strengthen data security, streamline compliance, and ensure even sensitive information in data-at-rest is discovered, protected, and governed more effectively. In addition, on-demand classification for endpoints is also generally available, giving organizations even broader coverage across their data estate. New usage posture and consumption reports: We’re introducing new usage posture and consumption reports, now in public preview. Admins can quickly identify compliance gaps, optimize Purview seat assignments, and understand how consumptive features are driving spend. With granular insights by feature, policy, and user type, admins can analyze usage trends, forecast costs, and toggle consumptive features on and off directly, all from a unified dashboard. The result: stronger compliance, easier cost management, and better alignment of Purview investments to your organization’s needs. Enable DLP and Copilot protection with extended SharePoint permissions: Extended SharePoint permissions, now generally available, make it simple to protect and manage files in SharePoint by allowing library owners to apply a default sensitivity label to an entire document library. When this is enabled, the label is dynamically enforced across all unprotected files in the library, both new and existing, within the library. Downloaded files are automatically encrypted, and access is managed based on SharePoint site membership, giving organizations powerful, scalable access control. With extended SharePoint permissions, teams can consistently apply labels at scale, automate DLP policy enforcement, and confidently deploy Copilot, all without the need for manually labeling files. Whether for internal teams, external partners, or any group where permissions need to be tightly controlled, extended SharePoint permissions streamline protection and compliance in SharePoint. Network file filtering via Entra GSA integration: We are integrating Purview with Microsoft Entra to enable file filtering at the network layer. These filtering controls help prevent sensitive content from being shared to unauthorized services based on properties such as sensitivity labels or presence of Purview sensitive information types (SITs) within the file. For example, Entra admins can now create a file policy to block files containing credit card numbers from passing through the network. Learn more here. Expanded protection scenarios enabled by Purview endpoint DLP: We are introducing several noteworthy enhancements to Purview endpoint DLP to protect an even broader range of exfiltration or leakage scenarios from organizational devices, without hindering user productivity. These enhancements, initially available on Windows devices, include: Extending protection to unsaved files: Files no longer need to be saved to disk to be protected under a DLP policy. With this improvement, unsaved files will undergo a point-in-time evaluation to detect the presence of sensitive data and apply the appropriate protections. Expanded support for removable media: Admins can now prevent data exfiltration to broader list of removable media devices, including iPhones, Android devices, and CD-ROMs. Protection for Outlook attachments downloaded to removable media or network shares: Admins can now prevent exfiltration of email attachments when users attempt to drag and drop them into USB devices, network shares, and other removable media. Expanded capability support for macOS: In addition to the new endpoint DLP protections introduced above, we are also expanding the following capabilities, already available for Windows devices, to devices running on macOS: Expanded file type coverage to 110+ file types, blanket protections for non-Office or PDF file types, addition of “allow” and “off” policy actions, device-based policy scoping to scope policies to specific devices or device groups (or apply exclusions), and integration with Power Automate. Manageability and alert investigation improvements in Purview DLP: Lastly, we are also introducing device manageability and alert investigation improvements in Purview DLP to simplify the day-to-day experience for admins. These improvements include: Reporting and troubleshooting improvements for devices onboarded to endpoint DLP: We are introducing additional tools for admins to build confidence in their Purview DLP protections for endpoint devices. These enhancements, designed to maximize reliability and enable better troubleshooting of potential issues, include near real-time reporting of policy syncs initiated on devices and policy health insights into devices’ compliance status and readiness to receive policies. Enhancements to always-on diagnostics: Earlier this year, we introduced always-on diagnostics to automatically collect logs from Windows endpoint devices, eliminating the need to reproduce issues when submitting an investigation request or raising a support ticket. This capability is expanding so that admins now have on-demand access to diagnostic logs from users’ devices without intervening in their operations. This further streamlines the issue resolution process for DLP admins while minimizing end user disruption. Simplified DLP alert investigation, including easier navigation to crucial alert details in just 1 click, and the ability to aggregate alerts originating from a single user for more streamlined investigation and response. For organizations who manage Purview DLP alerts within their broader incident management process in Microsoft Defender, we are pleased to share that alert severities will now be synced between the Purview portal and the Defender portal. Expanding enterprise-grade data security to small and medium businesses (SMBs): Purview is extending its reach beyond large enterprises by introducing a new add-on for Microsoft 365 Business Premium, bringing advanced data security and compliance capabilities to SMBs. The Microsoft Purview suite for Business Premium brings the same enterprise-grade protection, such as sensitivity labeling, data loss prevention, and compliance management, to organizations with up to 300 users. This enables SMBs to operate with the same level of compliance and data security as large enterprises, all within a simplified, cost-effective experience built for smaller teams. Stepping into the new era of technology with AI-powered data security Globally, there is a shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals. Simultaneously, the volume of alerts and incidents is ever growing. By infusing AI into data security solutions, admins can scale their impact. By reducing manual workloads, they enhance operational effectiveness and strengthen overall security posture – allowing defenders to stay ahead. In 2025, 82% of organizations have developed plans to use GenAI to fortify their data security programs. With its cutting-edge generative AI-powered investigative capabilities, Microsoft Purview Data Security Investigations (DSI) is transforming and scaling how data security admins analyze incident-related data. Since being released into public preview in April, the product has made a big impact with customers like Toyota Motors North America. "Data Security Investigations eliminates manual work, automating investigations in minutes. It’s designed to handle the scale and complexity of large data sets by correlating user activity with data movement, giving analysts a faster, more efficient path to meaningful insights,” said solution architect Dan Garawecki. This Ignite, we are introducing several new capabilities in DSI, including: DSI integration with DSPM: View proactive, summary insights and launch a Data Security Investigation directly from DSPM. This integration brings the full power of DSI analysis to your fingertips, enabling admins to drill into data risks surfaced in DSPM with speed and precision. Enhancements in DSI AI-powered deep content analysis capabilities: Admins can now add context before AI analysis for higher-quality, more efficient investigations. A new AI-powered natural language search function lets admins locate specific files using keywords, metadata, and embeddings. Vector search and content categorization enhancements allow admins to better identify risky assets. Together, these enhancements equip admins with sharper, faster tools for identifying buried data risks – both proactively and reactively. DSI cost transparency report and in-product estimator: To help customers manage pay-as-you-go billing, DSI is adding a new lightweight in-product cost estimator and transparency report. We are also expanding Security Copilot in Microsoft Purview with AI-powered capabilities that strengthen both the protection and investigation of sensitive data by introducing the Data Security Posture Agent and Data Security Triage Agent. Data Security Posture Agent: Available in preview, the new Data Security Posture Agent uses LLMs to help admins answer “Is this happening?” across thousands of files—delivering fast, intent-driven discovery and risk profiling, even when explicit keywords are absent. Integrated with Purview DSPM, it surfaces actionable insights and improves compliance, helping teams reduce risk and respond to threats before they escalate. Data Security Triage Agent: Alongside this, the Data Security Triage Agent, now generally available, enables analysts to efficiently triage and remediate the most critical alerts, automating incident response and surfacing the threats that matter most. Together, these agentic capabilities convert high-volume signals into consistent, closed-loop action, accelerate investigations and remediation, reduce policy-violation dwell time, and improve audit readiness, all natively integrated within Microsoft 365 and Purview so security teams can scale outcomes without scaling headcount. To make the agents easily accessible and help teams get started more quickly, we are excited to announce that Security Copilot will be available to all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Rollout starts today for existing Security Copilot customers with Microsoft 365 E5 and will continue in the upcoming months for all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Customers will receive advanced notice before activation. Learn more: https://aka.ms/SCP-Ignite25 Data security that keeps innovating alongside you As we look ahead, Microsoft Purview remains focused on empowering organizations with scalable solutions that address the evolving challenges of data security. While we deliver best-in-class security for Microsoft, we recognize that today’s organizations rarely operate in a single cloud, many businesses rely on a diverse mix of platforms to power their operations and innovation. That’s why we have been extending Purview’s capabilities beyond Microsoft environments, helping customers protect data across their entire digital estate. In a world where data is the lifeblood of innovation, securing it must be more than a checkbox—it must be a catalyst for progress. As organizations embrace AI, autonomous agents, and increasingly complex digital ecosystems, Microsoft Purview empowers them to move forward with confidence. By unifying visibility, governance, and protection across the entire data estate, Purview transforms security from a fragmented challenge into a strategic advantage. The future of data security isn’t just about defense—it’s about enabling bold, responsible innovation at scale. Let’s build that future together.Uncover hidden security risks with Microsoft Sentinel graph
Earlier this fall, we launched Microsoft Sentinel graph – and today, we are pleased to announce that Sentinel graph is generally available starting December 1, 2025. Microsoft Sentinel graph maps the interconnections across activity, asset, and threat intelligence data. This enables comprehensive graph-based security and analysis across pre-and post-breach scenarios in both Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview. Customers are already seeing the impact of the graph-powered experiences that is providing insights beyond tabular queries. "The predefined scenarios in Sentinel graph are excellent... it definitely shows where I would need to look as an investigator to figure out what's happening in my environment, who has access to it, not only directly, but also indirectly, a couple of hops away. And that's something that you really can't get through a standard KQL query..." - Gary Bushey, Security Architect, Cyclotron, Inc. Building on this foundation, we are taking Sentinel graph to the next level and are excited to announce the public preview of the following new capabilities. Graph MCP Tools Building on the hunting graph and blast radius analysis capabilities in Microsoft Defender portal. We are excited to announce preview of purpose-built Sentinel graph MCP tools (Blast Radius, Path Discovery, and Exposure Perimeter) that make the graph-powered insights accessible to the AI agents. Using these purpose-built Sentinel graph MCP tools, you will be able to use and build AI agents to get insights from the graph in natural language (figure 1): “What is the blast radius from ‘Laura Hanak’?” “Is there a path from user Mark Gafarov to key vault wg-prod?” “Who can all get to wg-prod key vault?” You can sign up here for a free preview of Sentinel graph MCP tools, which will also roll out starting December 1, 2025. Custom Graphs The security operations teams, including Tier-3 analysts, threat intelligence specialists, and security researchers play a critical role in investigating sophisticated attacks and addressing systemic security issues. Their responsibilities range from uncovering design vulnerabilities and tracing historical exploitation, to analyzing types of abuse and recommending effective solutions. These experts strive to identify hidden patterns within organizational data and struggle with the right tools that can help them differentiate between normal vs. abnormal, keep-up with the changing attack patterns, and handle massive and complex datasets at scale. This requires a high level of flexibility and customization to rapidly iterate on the analysis. We’re taking Microsoft Sentinel graph to the next level and are thrilled to announce the public preview of custom graphs with two new powerful approaches designed specifically for security: ephemeral custom graphs and materialized custom graphs. These innovative approaches empower defenders to create and analyze graphs tailored and tuned to their unique security scenarios to find hidden risks and patterns in their security data available in the Sentinel data lake. Using their data in the lake, defenders will be able author notebooks (figure 2) to model, build, visualize, traverse, and run advanced graph analyses like Chokepoint/Centrality, Blast Radius/Reachability, Prioritized Path/Ranked, and K-hop. It’s a transformative leap in graph analytics, fundamentally changing how security teams understand and mitigate organizational risk by connecting the dots in their data. Figure 2: Custom graphs using Notebook in VS Code You can sign up here for a free preview of custom graph capability, which will also roll out starting December 1, 2025. Ephemeral Custom Graphs Ephemeral custom graphs are for one-time investigations requiring quick pattern examination and rapidly changing large scale data that doesn't justify materialization for reuse. For example, in a typical SOC investigation, brute-force attempts or privilege escalations appear as isolated incidents. But in reality, attackers move laterally through interconnected credentials and resources. Let’s assume, a service account (svc-backup) used by a legacy database is compromised. It holds group membership in “DataOps-Admins,” which shares access with “Engineering-All.” A developer reuses their personal access token across staging and production clusters. Individually, these facts seem harmless. Together, they form a multi-hop credential exposure chain that can only be detected through graph traversal. Sentinel graph helps you to build ad-hoc graphs for an investigation and discarded afterward (not kept in a database for reuse). You can pull the data from the Sentinel data lake and build a graph to explore relationships, run analytics, iterate on nodes/edges, and refine queries in an interactive loop. Here are some additional scenarios where ephemeral custom graphs can expose hidden patterns: Sign-in anomaly hunting: An analyst graphs user logins against source IPs and timestamps to identify unusual patterns (like a single IP connecting to many accounts). By iterating on the graph (filtering nodes, adding context like geolocation), they can spot suspicious login clusters or a credential theft scenario. TTP (Tactics, Techniques, Procedures) investigation: For a specific threat (e.g., a known APT’s techniques), the hunter might use a graph template to map related events. Microsoft Sentinel, for instance, can provide hunting notebook templates for scenarios like investigating lateral movement or scanning logs for leaked credentials, so analysts quickly construct a graph of relevant evidence. Audit log pattern discovery: By graphing Office 365 activity logs or admin audit logs, defenders can apply advanced graph algorithms (like betweenness centrality) to find outliers – e.g., an account that intermediates many rare files access relationships might indicate insider abuse. Materialized Custom Graphs Materialized custom graphs are graph datasets that are stored and maintained over time, often updated at intervals (e.g., daily or hourly). Instead of being thrown away each session, these graphs will be materialized in the graph database for running graph analytics and visualization. Materialized custom graphs will enable organizations to create their custom enterprise knowledge graphs for various use cases, such as every organization already has an identity graph — they just haven’t visualized it yet. Imagine a large enterprise where users, devices, service principals, and applications are constantly changing. New credentials are issued, groups evolve, and permissions shift by the hour. Over time, this churn creates a complex web of implicit trust and shared access that no static tool can capture. Organizations can now build their own identity graphs and materialize them. These materialized custom graphs can continuously map relationships across Azure AD Domain Services, Entra ID, AWS IAM, SaaS platforms, and custom applications, updating daily or hourly to reflect the organization’s true security topology. Organizations can query these graphs and run various advanced graph algorithms and understand the chokepoint, blast radius, attack paths, and so on. This helps detect the gradual buildup of privilege overlap — when identities that were once isolated begin to share access paths through evolving group memberships, role assignments, or inherited permissions. Over weeks or months, these subtle shifts expand the blast radius of any single compromise. Behind the scenes We are partnering with our friends in Microsoft Fabric to bring these new capabilities to market. Mapping a large digital estate into a graph requires new scale out approach and that is what graph in Microsoft Fabric enables. “Discovering modern security risks is a massive data challenge. It requires connecting the dots across an entire digital estate, which can only be achieved with a graph at hyperscale. This is why our Fabric team's partnership with the Sentinel graph team is so critical. We’ve collaborated to build a scale-out graph solution capable of processing billion nodes and edges, delivering the performance and scale our largest security customers need to stay ahead of threats.” - Yitzhak Kesselman, CVP, Fabric Real-Time Intelligence Getting started Check out this video to learn more. To get access to the preview capabilities, please sign-up here. Reference links Data lake blog MCP server blogMicrosoft Security Store: Now Generally Available
When we launched the Microsoft Security Store in public preview on September 30, our goal was simple: make it easier for organizations to discover, purchase, and deploy trusted security solutions and AI agents that integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Security products. Today, Microsoft Security Store is generally available—with three major enhancements: Embedded where you work: Security Store is now built into Microsoft Defender, featuring SOC-focused agents, and into Microsoft Entra for Verified ID and External ID scenarios like fraud protection. By bringing these capabilities into familiar workflows, organizations can combine Microsoft and partner innovation to strengthen security operations and outcomes. Expanded catalog: Security Store now offers more than 100 third-party solutions, including advanced fraud prevention, forensic analysis, and threat intelligence agents. Security services available: Partners can now list and sell services such as managed detection and response and threat hunting directly through Security Store. Real-World Impact: What We Learned in Public Preview Thousands of customers explored Microsoft Security Store and tried a growing catalog of agents and SaaS solutions. While we are at the beginning of our journey, customer feedback shows these solutions are helping teams apply AI to improve security operations and reduce manual effort. Spairliners, a cloud-first aviation services joint venture between Air France and Lufthansa, strengthened identity and access controls by deploying Glueckkanja’s Privileged Admin Watchdog to enforce just-in-time access. “Using the Security Store felt easy, like adding an app in Entra. For a small team, being able to find and deploy security innovations in minutes is huge.” – Jonathan Mayer, Head of Innovation, Data and Quality GTD, a Chilean technology and telecommunications company, is testing a variety of agents from the Security Store: “As any security team, we’re always looking for ways to automate and simplify our operations. We are exploring and applying the world of agents more and more each day so having the Security Store is convenient—it’s easy to find and deploy agents. We’re excited about the possibilities for further automation and integrations into our workflows, like event-triggered agents, deeper Outlook integration, and more." – Jonathan Lopez Saez, Cybersecurity Architect Partners echoed the momentum they are seeing with the Security Store: “We’re excited by the early momentum with Security Store. We’ve already received multiple new leads since going live, including one in a new market for us, and we have multiple large deals we’re looking to drive through Security Store this quarter.” - Kim Brault, Head of Alliances, Delinea “Partnering with Microsoft through the Security Store has unlocked new ways to reach enterprise customers at scale. The store is pivotal as the industry shifts toward AI, enabling us to monetize agents without building our own billing infrastructure. With the new embedded experience, our solutions appear at the exact moment customers are looking to solve real problems. And by working with Microsoft’s vetting process, we help provide customers confidence to adopt AI agents” – Milan Patel, Co-founder and CEO, BlueVoyant “Agents and the Microsoft Security Store represent a major step forward in bringing AI into security operations. We’ve turned years of service experience into agentic automations, and it’s resonating with customers—we’ve been positively surprised by how quickly they’re adopting these solutions and embedding our automated agentic expertise into their workflows.” – Christian Kanja, Founder and CEO of glueckkanja New at GA: Embedded in Defender, Entra—Security Solutions right where you work Microsoft Security Store is now embedded in the Defender and Entra portals with partner solutions that extend your Microsoft Security products. By placing Security Store in front of security practitioners, it’s now easier than ever to use the best of partner and Microsoft capabilities in combination to drive stronger security outcomes. As Dorothy Li, Corporate Vice President of Security Copilot and Ecosystem put it, “Embedding the Security Store in our core security products is about giving customers access to innovative solutions that tap into the expertise of our partners. These solutions integrate with Microsoft Security products to complete end-to-end workflows, helping customers improve their security” Within the Microsoft Defender portal, SOC teams can now discover Copilot agents from both Microsoft and partners in the embedded Security Store, and run them all from a single, familiar interface. Let’s look at an example of how these agents might help in the day of the life of a SOC analyst. The day starts with Watchtower (BlueVoyant) confirming Sentinel connectors and Defender sensors are healthy, so investigations begin with full visibility. As alerts arrive, the Microsoft Defender Copilot Alert Triage Agent groups related signals, extracts key evidence, and proposes next steps; identity related cases are then validated with Login Investigator (adaQuest), which baselines recent sign-in behavior and device posture to cut false positives. To stay ahead of emerging campaigns, the analyst checks the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Briefing Agent for concise threat rundowns tied to relevant indicators, informing hunts and temporary hardening. When HR flags an offboarding, GuardianIQ (People Tech Group) correlates activity across Entra ID, email, and files to surface possible data exfiltration with evidence and risk scores. After containment, Automated Closing Comment Generator (Ascent Global Inc.) produces clear, consistent closure notes from Defender incident details, keeping documentation tight without hours of writing. Together, these Microsoft and partner agents maintain platform health, accelerate triage, sharpen identity decisions, add timely threat context, reduce insider risk blind spots, and standardize reporting—all inside the Defender portal. You can read more about the new agents available in the Defender portal in this blog. In addition, Security Store is now integrated into Microsoft Entra, focused on identity-centric solutions. Identity admins can discover and activate partner offerings for DDoS protection, intelligent bot defense, and government ID–based verification for account recovery —all within the Entra portal. With these capabilities, Microsoft Entra delivers a seamless, multi-layered defense that combines built-in identity protection with best-in-class partner technologies, making it easier than ever for enterprises to strengthen resilience against modern identity threats. Learn more here. Levent Besik, VP of Microsoft Entra, shared that “This sets a new benchmark for identity security and partner innovation at Microsoft. Attacks on digital identities can come from anywhere. True security comes from defense in depth, layering protection across the entire user journey so every interaction, from the first request to identity recovery, stays secure. This launch marks only the beginning; we will continue to introduce additional layers of protection to safeguard every aspect of the identity journey” New at GA: Services Added to a Growing Catalog of Agents and SaaS For the first time, partners can offer their security services directly through the Security Store. Customers can now find, buy, and activate managed detection and response, threat hunting, and other expert services—making it easier to augment internal teams and scale security operations. Every listing has a MXDR Verification that certifies they are providing next generation advanced threat detection and response services. You can browse all the services available at launch here, and read about some of our exciting partners below: Avanade is proud to be a launch partner for professional services in the Microsoft Security Store. As a leading global Microsoft Security Services provider, we’re excited to make our offerings easier to find and help clients strengthen cyber defenses faster through this streamlined platform - Jason Revill, Avanade Global Security Technology Lead ProServeIT partnering with Microsoft to have our offers in the Microsoft Security Store helps ProServeIT protect our joint customers and allows us to sell better with Microsoft sellers. It shows customers how our technology and services support each other to create a safe and secure platform - Eric Sugar, President Having Reply’s security services showcased in the Microsoft Security Store is a significant milestone for us. It amplifies our ability to reach customers at the exact point where they evaluate and activate Microsoft security solutions, ensuring our offerings are visible alongside Microsoft’s trusted technologies. Notable New Selections Since public preview, the Security Store catalog has grown significantly. Customers can now choose from over 100 third-party solutions, including 60+ SaaS offerings and 50+ Security Copilot agents, with new additions every week. Recent highlights include Cisco Duo and Rubrik: Cisco Duo IAM delivers comprehensive, AI-driven identity protection combining MFA, SSO, passwordless and unified directory management. Duo IAM seamlessly integrates across the Microsoft Security suite—enhancing Entra ID with risk-based authentication and unified access policy management across cloud and on-premises applications seamlessly in just a few clicks. Intune for device compliance and access enforcement. Sentinel for centralized security monitoring and threat detection through critical log ingestion about authentication events, administrator actions, and risk-based alerts, providing real-time visibility across the identity stack. Rubrik's data security platform delivers complete cyber resilience across enterprise, cloud, and SaaS alongside Microsoft. Through the Microsoft Sentinel integration, Rubrik’s data management capabilities are combined with Sentinel’s security analytics to accelerate issue resolution, enabling unified visibility and streamlined responses. Furthermore, Rubrik empowers organizations to reduce identity risk and ensure operational continuity with real-time protection, unified visibility and rapid recovery across Microsoft Active Directory and Entra ID infrastructure. The Road Ahead This is just the beginning. Microsoft Security Store will continue to make it even easier for customers to improve their security outcomes by tapping into the innovation and expertise of our growing partner ecosystem. The momentum we’re seeing is clear—customers are already gaining real efficiencies and stronger outcomes by adopting AI-powered agents. As we work together with partners, we’ll unlock even more automation, deeper integrations, and new capabilities that help security teams move faster and respond smarter. Explore the Security Store today to see what’s possible. For a more detailed walk-through of the capabilities, read our previous public preview Tech Community post If you’re a partner, now is the time to list your solutions and join us in shaping the future of security.Beyond Visibility: The new Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) experience
In today’s AI-powered enterprises, understanding your data estate—and the risks that come with it—is both more complex and more critical than ever. Meanwhile, many organizations still grapple with a fragmented data security landscape, relying on a patchwork of disconnected tools that obscure visibility and hinder effective data security posture management. As AI adoption accelerates, entirely new data risk vectors are emerging—ranging from oversharing and compliance gaps to operational inefficiencies. According to recent research[1], 40% of data security incidents now occur within AI applications, and 78% of AI users are bringing their own AI tools to work. This challenge is further compounded by the rise of AI agents, creating a scenario that demands a unified, context-aware approach to understanding and securing data within trusted workflows. This is where data security posture management helps organizations - by providing the visibility and control they need across sprawling data estates and evolving risk surfaces. By continuously assessing data security posture, organizations can better identify gaps and remediate risks, avoiding fragmented efforts. However, even with these capabilities, many organizations still struggle to stay focused on the ultimate goal—achieving meaningful security outcomes rather than simply managing tools or processes. To overcome this, organizations must shift their perspective: seeing data security not as a collection of individual solutions, but as a holistic program anchored in desired business and security outcomes. Managing data security posture should become the foundation for building a sustainable and healthy data security program—one that continuously improves, drives measurable resilience, strengthens trust, and systematically reduces risk across the enterprise. At Microsoft Ignite, we’re excited to share the newly enhanced Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) experience—an AI-powered, centralized solution that focuses on the goals your organization needs to accomplish, and helps you strengthen data security to confidently embrace AI apps and agents with actionable insights, new third-party signals, and Security Copilot agents. Enabling AI and agents confidently with enhanced data security posture The enhanced DSPM experience is designed to simplify data security posture by stitching together the scenarios and goals customers need to achieve when it comes to their data. We are combining the depth of Purview visibility and controls with the breadth of external signals and agentic activities, complemented by Security Copilot agents, to provide a strong, proactive DSPM experience. See what’s new in Purview DSPM: ▪ Outcome-based guided workflows: To avoid the guesswork of interpreting insights and determining the next best actions, now customers can manage their data security posture by selecting which data security outcome to prioritize and the risks related to each—shifting from reactive visibility to actionable, outcome-driven insights. For each outcome, this experience will guide customers through the key metrics and risk patterns present in their organization, as well as a recommended action plan, including the expected impact of taking those actions. For example, if an admin chooses to address the risk of “Preventing sensitive data exfiltration to risky destinations,” DSPM will show how many sensitive files are at risk, how many have been exfiltrated to personal domains or external cloud services in the past 30 days, and provide recommended actions to mitigate these risks. These actions may include creating a new DLP policy and an IRM policy to detect and prevent such exfiltration to personal emails, and admins can see the impact each of these actions will have. After that, they can continuously assess their data security posture through the outcome metrics. [Figure 1: List of data security objectives, with metrics and remediation plans per objective] ▪ External data source visibility: Organizations trust Microsoft for collaboration and productivity, but their footprint spans to external data platforms too. To provide a more complete and comprehensive view of data risks across the digital estate, we’re excited to announce the advancement of the Purview partner ecosystem, with the inclusion of third-party signals in DSPM through the collaboration with our partners Varonis, BigID, Cyera and OneTrust. This partnership, possible via integration with Microsoft Sentinel Data Lake, is designed to help organizations see and understand more of their data—wherever it resides. Through DSPM, a customer will be able to easily turn on these external data signals and evaluate data asset information (such as permissions, location, sensitive information types) in these environments. Available sources initially will be: Salesforce (provided by Varonis), Databricks (provided by BigID), Snowflake (provided by Cyera), and Google Cloud Platform (provided by OneTrust), with additional external data coverage coming soon. By integrating these external data sources into Purview, data security teams gain extended visibility into sensitive data across third-party platforms alongside their Microsoft data, which also empowers teams to raise their confidence when adopting AI apps and agents by expanding visibility on external data that is referenced by those tools. This collaboration not only eliminates blind spots and strengthens risk posture, but also simplifies data security operations with a single, streamlined experience. These signals will be offered using pay-as-you-go billing through Microsoft Sentinel consumptive meters. Learn more here. [Figure 2: Asset explorer with external data from Databricks, Snowflake, Google Cloud Platform, and Salesforce] ▪ New out-of-the-box reports for posture insights: DSPM also extends visibility by presenting new out-of-the-box reports that deliver immediate visibility into top-of-mind metrics organizations care about, such as protection coverage via Sensitivity labels, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy triggers, and posture trends over time. With advanced filtering options and deep drilldowns, security teams can quickly identify unprotected sensitive data, track label adoption, monitor policy effectiveness, and surface potential risks earlier. These actionable insights streamline monitoring and support precise policy fine-tuning, enabling data security teams to shift from reactive operations to proactive, data-driven strategic decisions. ▪ Expanded coverage and remediation on Data Risk Assessments: DSPM now extends Data Risk Assessments to item-level analysis with automated new remediation actions like—enabling bulk disabling of overshared SharePoint links and direct activation of protection policies. Starting from an outcome-based remediation plan or the Data Risk Assessment tab, teams can take targeted actions such as removing or tightening sharing links, notifying owners, and applying or updating sensitivity labels—including new support for bulk manual labeling from search—so fixes occur where the risky items reside, and progress is immediately reflected in posture metrics. Beyond Microsoft 365, Data Risk Assessments have also expanded to Microsoft Fabric, surfacing Fabric assets in a new default assessment and proactive actions to protect new Fabric assets with DLP policies or sensitivity labels. These enhancements address key customer challenges around visibility gaps, fragmented remediation workflows, and governance across hybrid environments. AI agents are growing rapidly in enterprise environments, bringing unique data risks that traditional security can’t address. Their autonomous actions and broad access to sensitive information create complex risk profiles tied to behavior, not just identity. To stay secure, organizations need data protection strategies that treat agents as first-class entities with tailored visibility, risk scoring, and policy controls. DSPM is also adapting to this new scenario: ▪ AI Observability for agents: We’re introducing a dedicated view within DSPM that treats agents—such as the ones created on Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and Azure AI Foundry—as first-class entities in your organizations when it comes to data security posture. It provides a unified inventory of all agents – including third-party agents – as well as the assigned insider risk level based on the agent behavior, posture metrics, and activity trends of each agent. Security teams can drill down into individual agents to see contextual insights like risky behaviors, oversharing patterns, and can take recommended actions, such as the creation of retention policies. AI Observability gives customers clear visibility across agents and connects insights to guided actions— simplifying governance, facilitating risk prioritization, and enabling secure AI adoption without slowing innovation. [Figure 3: AI Observability plane with inventory of 1st and 3rd party agents within the organization, as well as assigned risk level per agent] Learn more about all the innovations we are announcing to help you safely adopt agents. Redefining data security posture for the AI-powered era The new DSPM experience marks a pivotal moment in Microsoft Purview’s journey to secure the modern enterprise. By unifying visibility, protection, and investigation across human and agentic data activity, Purview empowers organizations to embrace AI responsibly, reduce risk, and drive continuous improvement in their data security posture. When it comes to leveraging built-in AI within data security solutions, admins can view proactive or summary insights and launch a Data Security Investigation (DSI) directly from DSPM. This important integration allows admins to utilize the power and scale of DSI analysis to take a closer look at data risks. Furthermore, applying AI to strengthen data security is just as critical as securing AI itself, as AI-powered solutions help organizations anticipate and neutralize risks at scale, and agents have the potential to take data security processes to another level, increasing automation and allowing teams to focus on the most pressing risks. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce the Data Security Posture Agent, designed to augment the new Purview DSPM experience even further. This agent leverages LLMs to understand context and intent, going beyond traditional classifiers that can often miss nuance. It analyzes selected file sets and generates precise reports on requested information, such as merger & acquisition details or PO numbers. Armed with these insights, admins can decide on their own next steps, whether that’s applying new labels, updating policies, or initiating investigations, streamlining discovery and risk reduction in one intelligent, outcome-driven experience. This capability tackles the challenges of manual, time-consuming data analysis and limited visibility into sensitive information, helping organizations achieve faster resolution, stronger compliance posture, and greater operational efficiency. [Figure 4: Data Security Posture Agent to discover sensitive data and take appropriate actions] Combined with the Data Security Triage agent and other Security Copilot capabilities integrated within Purview, the Data Security Posture agent creates a robust AI-powered foundation for modern data security teams. To make the agents easily accessible and help teams get started more quickly, we are excited to announce that Security Copilot will be available to all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Rollout starts today for existing Security Copilot customers with Microsoft 365 E5 and will continue in the upcoming months for all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. Customers will receive advanced notice before activation. Learn more: https://aka.ms/SCP-Ignite25 Building the future of data security alongside customers As organizations navigate this new era of AI-driven innovation, the ability to secure data confidently and proactively is no longer optional—it’s mission-critical. Microsoft Purview DSPM delivers a unified, outcome-based approach that transforms complexity into clarity, guiding teams from insight to action with precision. Current solutions Purview DSPM and DSPM for AI will remain available until June, when the new Purview DSPM experience becomes the centralized solution. Costumers’ top-of-mind capabilities within current workflows, such as Data Risk Assessments and Security Copilot prompt gallery, will also be available within the new DSPM experience. These new capabilities will be available in Public Preview within the next few weeks. By extending visibility across external sources, introducing AI observability, and empowering remediation through intelligent agents, Purview enables enterprises to embrace AI and agents without compromise—strengthening trust, reducing risk, and driving continuous improvement in data security posture. The future of secure AI adoption starts here. Getting connected with Microsoft Purview Read our blog with the main announcements across the Purview data security solutions at Ignite. Try Microsoft Purview data security. Learn more about Microsoft Purview on our website and Microsoft Learn. [1] July 2025 multi-national survey of over 1700 data security professionals commissioned by Microsoft from Hypothesis GroupIgnite your future with new security skills during Microsoft Ignite 2025
Ignite your future with new security skills during Microsoft Ignite 2025 AI and cloud technologies are reshaping every industry. Organizations need professionals who can secure AI solutions, modernize infrastructure, and drive innovation responsibly. Ignite brings together experts, learning, and credentials to help you get skilled for the future. Take on the Secure and Govern AI with Confidence Challenge Start your journey with the Azure Skilling Microsoft Challenge. These curated challenges help you practice real-world scenarios and earn recognition for your skills. One of the challenges featured is the Secure and Govern AI with Confidence challenge. This challenge helps you: Implement AI governance frameworks. Configure responsible AI guardrails in Azure AI Foundry. Apply security best practices for AI workloads. Special Offer: Be among the first 5,000 participants to complete this challenge and receive a discounted certification exam voucher—a perfect way to validate your skills and accelerate your career. Completing this challenge earns you a badge and prepares you for advanced credentials—ideal for anyone looking to lead in AI security. Join the challenge today! Validate Your Expertise with this new Microsoft Applied Skill. Applied Skills assessments are scenario-based, so you demonstrate practical expertise—not just theory. Earn the Secure AI Solutions in the Cloud credential—a job-ready validation of your ability to: Configure security for AI services using Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Implement governance and guardrails in Azure AI Foundry. Protect sensitive data and ensure compliance across AI workloads. This applied skill is designed for professionals who want to lead in AI security, accelerate career growth, and stand out in a competitive market. To learn how to prepare and take the applied skill, visit here. Your Next Steps: Security Plans Ignite isn’t just about live sessions—it’s about giving you on-demand digital content and curated learning paths so you can keep building skills long after the event ends. With 15 curated security plans that discuss topics such as controlling access with Microsoft Entra and securing your organization’s data, find what is relevant to you on Microsoft Ignite: Keep the momentum going page.
Unlocking the Power of Microsoft Purview for ChatGPT Enterprise
In today's rapidly evolving technology landscape, data security and compliance are key. Microsoft Purview offers a robust solution for managing and securing interactions with AI based solutions. This integration not only enhances data governance but also ensures that sensitive information is handled with the appropriate controls. Let's dive into the benefits of this integration and outline the steps to integrate with ChatGPT Enterprise in specific. The integration works for Entra connected users on the ChatGPT workspace, if you have needs that goes beyond this, please tell us why and how it impacts you. Important update 1: Effective May 1, these capabilities require you to enable pay-as-you-go billing in your organization. Important update 2: From May 19, you are required to create a collection policy to ingest ChatGPT Enterprise information. In DSPM for AI you will find this one click process. Benefits of Integrating ChatGPT Enterprise with Microsoft Purview Enhanced Data Security: By integrating ChatGPT Enterprise with Microsoft Purview, organizations can ensure that interactions are securely captured and stored within their Microsoft 365 tenant. This includes user text prompts and AI app text responses, providing a comprehensive record of communications. Compliance and Governance: Microsoft Purview offers a range of compliance solutions, including Insider Risk Management, eDiscovery, Communication Compliance, and Data Lifecycle & Records Management. These tools help organizations meet regulatory requirements and manage data effectively. Customizable Detection: The integration allows for the detection of built in can custom classifiers for sensitive information, which can be customized to meet the specific needs of the organization. To help ensures that sensitive data is identified and protected. The audit data streams into Advanced Hunting and the Unified Audit events that can generate visualisations of trends and other insights. Seamless Integration: The ChatGPT Enterprise integration uses the Purview API to push data into Compliant Storage, ensuring that external data sources cannot access and push data directly. This provides an additional layer of security and control. Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up the Integration 1. Get Object ID for the Purview account in Your Tenant: Go to portal.azure.com and search for "Microsoft Purview" in the search bar. Click on "Microsoft Purview accounts" from the search results. Select the Purview account you are using and copy the account name. Go to portal.azure.com and search for “Enterprise" in the search bar. Click on Enterprise applications. Remove the filter for Enterprise Applications Select All applications under manage, search for the name and copy the Object ID. 2. Assign Graph API Roles to Your Managed Identity Application: Assign Purview API roles to your managed identity application by connecting to MS Graph utilizing Cloud Shell in the Azure portal. Open a PowerShell window in portal.azure.com and run the command Connect-MgGraph. Authenticate and sign in to your account. Run the following cmdlet to get the ServicePrincipal ID for your organization for the Purview API app. (Get-MgServicePrincipal -Filter "AppId eq '9ec59623-ce40-4dc8-a635-ed0275b5d58a'").id This command provides the permission of Purview.ProcessConversationMessages.All to the Microsoft Purview Account allowing classification processing. Update the ObjectId to the one retrieved in step 1 for command and body parameter. Update the ResourceId to the ServicePrincipal ID retrieved in the last step. $bodyParam= @{ "PrincipalId"= "{ObjectID}" "ResourceId" = "{ResourceId}" "AppRoleId" = "{a4543e1f-6e5d-4ec9-a54a-f3b8c156163f}" } New-MgServicePrincipalAppRoleAssignment -ServicePrincipalId '{ObjectId}' -BodyParameter $bodyParam It will look something like this from the command line We also need to add the permission for the application to read the user accounts to correctly map the ChatGPT Enterprise user with Entra accounts. First run the following command to get the ServicePrincipal ID for your organization for the GRAPH app. (Get-MgServicePrincipal -Filter "AppId eq '00000003-0000-0000-c000-000000000000'").id The following step adds the permission User.Read.All to the Purview application. Update the ObjectId with the one retrieved in step 1. Update the ResourceId with the ServicePrincipal ID retrieved in the last step. $bodyParam= @{ "PrincipalId"= "{ObjectID}" "ResourceId" = "{ResourceId}" "AppRoleId" = "{df021288-bdef-4463-88db-98f22de89214}" } New-MgServicePrincipalAppRoleAssignment -ServicePrincipalId '{ObjectId}' -BodyParameter $bodyParam 3. Store the ChatGPT Enterprise API Key in Key Vault The steps for setting up Key vault integration for Data Map can be found here Create and manage credentials for scans in the Microsoft Purview Data Map | Microsoft Learn When setup you will see something like this in Key vault. 4. Integrate ChatGPT Enterprise Workspace to Purview: Create a new data source in Purview Data Map that connects to the ChatGPT Enterprise workspace. Go to purview.microsoft.com and select Data Map, search if you do not see it on the first screen. Select Data sources Select Register Search for ChatGPT Enterprise and select Provide your ChatGPT Enterprise ID Create the first scan by selecting Table view and filter on ChatGPT Add your key vault credentials to the scan Test the connection and once complete click continue When you click continue the following screen will show up, if everything is ok click Save and run. Validate the progress by clicking on the name, completion of the first full scan may take an extended period of time. Depending on size it may take more than 24h to complete. If you click on the scan name you expand to all the runs for that scan. When the scan completes you can start to make use of the DSPM for AI experience to review interactions with ChatGPT Enterprise. The mapping to the users is based on the ChatGPT Enterprise connection to Entra, with prompts and responses stored in the user's mailbox. 5. Review and Monitor Data: Please see this article for required permissions and guidance around Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI, Microsoft Purview data security and compliance protections for Microsoft 365 Copilot and other generative AI apps | Microsoft Learn Use Purview DSPM for AI analytics and Activity Explorer to review interactions and classifications. You can expand on prompts and responses in ChatGPT Enterprise 6. Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance Communication Compliance (here after CC) is a feature of Microsoft Purview that allows you to monitor and detect inappropriate or risky interactions with ChatGPT Enterprise. You can monitor and detect requests and responses that are inappropriate based on ML models, regular Sensitive Information Types, and other classifiers in Purview. This can help you identify Jailbreak and Prompt injection attacks and flag them to IRM and for case management. Detailed steps to configure CC policies and supported configurations can be found here. 7. Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management We believe that Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management (here after IRM) can serve a key role in protecting your AI workloads long term. With its adaptive protection capabilities, IRM dynamically adjusts user access based on evolving risk levels. In the event of heightened risk, IRM can enforce Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies on sensitive content, apply tailored Entra Conditional Access policies, and initiate other necessary actions to effectively mitigate potential risks. This strategic approach will help you to apply more stringent policies where it matters avoiding a boil the ocean approach to allow your team to get started using AI. To get started use the signals that are available to you including CC signals to raise IRM tickets and enforce adaptive protection. You should create your own custom IRM policy for this. Do include Defender signals as well. Based on elevated risk you may select to block users from accessing certain assets such as ChatGPT Enterprise. Please see this article for more detail Block access for users with elevated insider risk - Microsoft Entra ID | Microsoft Learn. 8. eDiscovery eDiscovery of AI interactions is crucial for legal compliance, transparency, accountability, risk management, and data privacy protection. Many industries must preserve and discover electronic communications and interactions to meet regulatory requirements. Including AI interactions in eDiscovery ensures organizations comply with these obligations and preserves relevant evidence for litigation. This process also helps maintain trust by enabling the review of AI decisions and actions, demonstrating due diligence to regulators. Microsoft Purview eDiscovery solutions | Microsoft Learn 9. Data Lifecycle Management Microsoft Purview offers robust solutions to manage AI data from creation to deletion, including classification, retention, and secure disposal. This ensures that AI interactions are preserved and retrievable for audits, litigation, and compliance purposes. Please see this article for more information Automatically retain or delete content by using retention policies | Microsoft Learn. Closing By following these steps, organizations can leverage the full potential of Microsoft Purview to enhance the security and compliance of their ChatGPT Enterprise interactions. This integration not only provides peace of mind but also empowers organizations to manage their data more effectively. We are still in preview some of the features listed are not fully integrated, please reach out to us if you have any questions or if you have additional requirements.Sentinel UEBA’s Superpower: Actionable Insights You Can Use! Now with Okta and Multi-Cloud Logs!
Microsoft Sentinel continues to evolve as a cloud-native Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solution, empowering security teams to detect, investigate, and respond to threats with speed and precision. The latest update introduces advanced User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA), expanding support for new eligible logs, including multi-cloud sources and the Okta identity provider. This leap strengthens coverage and productivity by surfacing anomalies, actionable insights, and rich security context across entities and raw logs. Building on these enhancements, Sentinel UEBA now enables security teams to correlate activity seamlessly across diverse platforms like Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and Okta, providing a unified risk perspective and empowering SOC analysts to quickly identify suspicious patterns such as unusual logins, privilege escalations, or anomalous access attempts. By leveraging behavioral baselines and contextual data about users, devices, and cloud resources, organizations benefit from improved detection accuracy and a reduction in false positives, streamlining investigations and accelerating threat response. For our Government Customers and for information about feature availability in US Government clouds, see the Microsoft Sentinel tables in Cloud feature availability for US Government customers. What’s New in Sentinel UEBA? Expanded Log Support: Sentinel now ingests and analyzes logs from a broader set of sources, including multi-cloud environments and Okta. This means security teams can correlate user and entity activity across Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and Okta, gaining a unified view of risk. Actionable Insights: UEBA surfaces anomalies, such as unusual login patterns, privilege escalations, and suspicious access attempts by analyzing behavioral baselines and deviations. These insights help SOC analysts prioritize investigations and respond to threats faster. Rich Security Context: By combining raw logs with contextual information about users, devices, and cloud resources, Sentinel UEBA provides a holistic view of each entity’s risk posture. This enables more accurate detection and reduces false positives. To maximize the benefits of Sentinel UEBA’s expanded capabilities, organizations should focus on integrating all relevant cloud and identity sources, establishing behavioral baselines for users and entities, and leveraging automated response workflows to streamline investigations. Continuous tuning of UEBA policies and proactive onboarding of new log sources, such as Okta and multi-cloud environments, ensures that security teams remain agile in the face of evolving threats. By utilizing dedicated dashboards to monitor for anomalies like impossible travel and privilege changes, and by training SOC analysts to interpret insights and automate incident responses, teams can significantly enhance their threat detection and mitigation strategies while fostering a culture of ongoing learning and operational excellence. Microsoft Learn, UEBA Engine Key Practices for Maximizing UEBA To help organizations fully leverage the latest capabilities of Sentinel UEBA, adopting proven practices is essential. The following key strategies will empower security teams to maximize value, enhance detection, and streamline their operations. Integrate Multi-Cloud Logs: Ensure all relevant cloud and identity sources (Azure, AWS, GCP, Okta) are connected to Sentinel for comprehensive coverage. Baseline Normal Behavior: Use UEBA to establish behavioral baselines for users and entities, making it easier to spot anomalies. Automate Response: Leverage Sentinel’s SOAR capabilities to automate investigation and response workflows for detected anomalies. Continuous Tuning: Regularly review and refine UEBA policies to adapt to evolving threats and organizational changes. This image shows how Microsoft Sentinel UEBA analyzes user and entity behavior to detect suspicious activity and anomalies, helping security teams identify advanced threats and insider risks more accurately. Microsoft Learn, UEBA pipeline Call to Action Start by onboarding Okta and multi-cloud logs into Sentinel. Use UEBA dashboards to monitor for unusual activities, such as impossible travel, multiple failed logins, or privilege changes. Automate alerts and incident response to reduce manual workload and accelerate threat mitigation. Assess your current log sources and identity providers. Onboard Okta and multi-cloud logs into Sentinel, enable UEBA, and start monitoring behavioral anomalies. Train your SOC team on interpreting UEBA insights and automating response actions. Stay ahead of threats by continuously tuning your analytics and integrating new sources as your environment evolves. Reference Links for Sentinel UEBA Advanced threat detection with User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) in Microsoft Sentinel Enable User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) in Microsoft Sentinel Microsoft Sentinel User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) reference Investigate incidents with UEBA data What's new in Microsoft Sentinel Microsoft Sentinel documentation home About the Author: Hi! Jacques “Jack” here, Microsoft Technical Trainer. I’m passionate about empowering teams to master security and operational excellence. As you advance your skills, pair technical expertise with a commitment to sharing knowledge and ongoing training. Create opportunities to lead workshops, stay current on threats and best practices, and foster a culture of continuous learning. #SkilledByMTT #MicrosoftLearnIntroducing Microsoft Sentinel graph (Public Preview)
Security is being reengineered for the AI era—moving beyond static, rulebound controls and after-the-fact response toward platform-led, machine-speed defense. The challenge is clear: fragmented tools, sprawling signals, and legacy architectures that can’t match the velocity and scale of modern attacks. What’s needed is an AI-ready, data-first foundation—one that turns telemetry into a security graph, standardizes access for agents, and coordinates autonomous actions while keeping humans in command of strategy and high-impact investigations. Security teams already center operations on their SIEM for end-to-end visibility, and we’re advancing that foundation by evolving Microsoft Sentinel into both the SIEM and the platform for agentic defense—connecting analytics and context across ecosystems. And today, we announced the general availability of Sentinel data lake and introduced new preview platform capabilities that are built on Sentinel data lake (Figure 1), so protection accelerates to machine speed while analysts do their best work. We are excited to announce the public preview of Microsoft Sentinel graph, a deeply connected map of your digital estate across endpoints, cloud, email, identity, SaaS apps, and enriched with our threat intelligence. Sentinel graph, a core capability of the Sentinel platform, enables Defenders and Agentic AI to connect the dots and bring deep context quickly, enabling modern defense across pre-breach and post-breach. Starting today, we are delivering new graph-based analytics and interactive visualization capabilities across Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview. Attackers think in graphs. For a long time, defenders have been limited to querying and analyzing data in lists forcing them to think in silos. With Sentinel graph, Defenders and AI can quickly reveal relationships, traversable digital paths to understand blast radius, privilege escalation, and anomalies across large, cloud-scale data sets, deriving deep contextual insight across their digital estate, SOC teams and their AI Agents can stay proactive and resilient. With Sentinel graph-powered experiences in Defender and Purview, defenders can now reason over assets, identities, activities, and threat intelligence to accelerate detection, hunting, investigation, and response. Incident graph in Defender. The incident graph in the Microsoft Defender portal is now enriched with ability to analyze blast radius of the active attack. During an incident investigation, the blast radius analysis quickly evaluates and visualizes the vulnerable paths an attacker could take from a compromise entity to a critical asset. This allows SOC teams to effectively prioritize and focus their attack mitigation and response saving critical time and limiting impact. Hunting graph in Defender. Threat hunting often requires connecting disparate pieces of data to uncover hidden paths that attackers exploit to reach your crown jewels. With the new hunting graph, analysts can visually traverse the complex web of relationships between users, devices, and other entities to reveal privileged access paths to critical assets. This graph-powered exploration transforms threat hunting into a proactive mission, enabling SOC teams to surface vulnerabilities and intercept attacks before they gain momentum. This approach shifts security operations from reactive alert handling to proactive threat hunting, enabling teams to identify vulnerabilities and stop attacks before they escalate. Data risk graph in Purview Insider Risk Management (IRM). Investigating data leaks and insider risks is challenging when information is scattered across multiple sources. The data risk graph in IRM offers a unified view across SharePoint and OneDrive, connecting users, assets, and activities. Investigators can see not just what data was leaked, but also the full blast radius of risky user activity. This context helps data security teams triage alerts, understand the impact of incidents, and take targeted actions to prevent future leaks. Data risk graph in Purview Data Security Investigation (DSI). To truly understand a data breach, you need to follow the trail—tracking files and their activities across every tool and source. The data risk graph does this by automatically combining unified audit logs, Entra audit logs, and threat intelligence, providing an invaluable insight. With the power of the data risk graph, data security teams can pinpoint sensitive data access and movement, map potential exfiltration paths, and visualize the users and activities linked to risky files, all in one view. Getting started Microsoft Defender If you already have the Sentinel data lake, the required graph will be auto provisioned when you login into the Defender portal; hunting graph and incident graph experience will appear in the Defender portal. New to data lake? Use the Sentinel data lake onboarding flow to provision the data lake and graph. Microsoft Purview Follow the Sentinel data lake onboarding flow to provision the data lake and graph. In Purview Insider Risk Management (IRM), follow the instructions here. In Purview Data Security Investigation (DSI), follow the instructions here. Reference links Watch Microsoft Secure Microsoft Secure news blog Data lake blog MCP server blog ISV blog Security Store blog Copilot blog Microsoft Sentinel—AI-Powered Cloud SIEM | Microsoft Security
