From “No” to “Now”: A 7-Layer Strategy for Enterprise AI Safety
The “block” posture on Generative AI has failed. In a global enterprise, banning these tools doesn't stop usage; it simply pushes intellectual property into unmanaged channels and creates a massive visibility gap in corporate telemetry. The priority has now shifted from stopping AI to hardening the environment so that innovation can run at velocity without compromising data sovereignty. Traditional security perimeters are ineffective against the “slow bleed” of AI leakage - where data moves through prompts, clipboards, and autonomous agents rather than bulk file transfers. To secure this environment, a 7-layer defense-in-depth model is required to treat the conversation itself as the new perimeter. 1. Identity: The Only Verifiable Perimeter Identity is the primary control plane. Access to AI services must be treated with the same rigor as administrative access to core infrastructure. The strategy centers on enforcing device-bound Conditional Access, where access is strictly contingent on device health. To solve the "Account Leak" problem, the deployment of Tenant Restrictions v2 (TRv2) is essential to prevent users from signing into personal tenants using corporate-managed devices. For enhanced coverage, Universal Tenant Restrictions (UTR) via Global Secure Access (GSA) allows for consistent enforcement at the cloud edge. While TRv2 authentication-plane is GA, data-plane protection is GA for the Microsoft 365 admin center and remains in preview for other workloads such as SharePoint and Teams. 2. Eliminating the Visibility Gap (Shadow AI) You can’t secure what you can't see. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (MDCA) serves to discover and govern the enterprise AI footprint, while Purview DSPM for AI (formerly AI Hub) monitors Copilot and third-party interactions. By categorizing tools using MDCA risk scores and compliance attributes, organizations can apply automated sanctioning decisions and enforce session controls for high-risk endpoints. 3. Data Hygiene: Hardening the “Work IQ” AI acts as a mirror of internal permissions. In a "flat" environment, AI acts like a search engine for your over-shared data. Hardening the foundation requires automated sensitivity labeling in Purview Information Protection. Identifying PII and proprietary code before assigning AI licenses ensures that labels travel with the data, preventing labeled content from being exfiltrated via prompts or unauthorized sharing. 4. Session Governance: Solving the “Clipboard Leak” The most common leak in 2025 is not a file upload; it’s a simple copy-paste action or a USB transfer. Deploying Conditional Access App Control (CAAC) via MDCA session policies allows sanctioned apps to function while specifically blocking cut/copy/paste. This is complemented by Endpoint DLP, which extends governance to the physical device level, preventing sensitive data from being moved to unmanaged USB storage or printers during an AI-assisted workflow. Purview Information Protection with IRM rounds this out by enforcing encryption and usage rights on the files themselves. When a user tries to print a "Do Not Print" document, Purview triggers an alert that flows into Microsoft Sentinel. This gives the SOC visibility into actual policy violations instead of them having to hunt through generic activity logs. 5. The “Agentic” Era: Agent 365 & Sharing Controls Now that we're moving from "Chat" to "Agents", Agent 365 and Entra Agent ID provide the necessary identity and control plane for autonomous entities. A quick tip: in large-scale tenants, default settings often present a governance risk. A critical first step is navigating to the Microsoft 365 admin center (Copilot > Agents) to disable the default “Anyone in organization” sharing option. Restricting agent creation and sharing to a validated security group is essential to prevent unvetted agent sprawl and ensure that only compliant agents are discoverable. 6. The Human Layer: “Safe Harbors” over Bans Security fails when it creates more friction than the risk it seeks to mitigate. Instead of an outright ban, investment in AI skilling-teaching users context minimization (redacting specifics before interacting with a model) - is the better path. Providing a sanctioned, enterprise-grade "Safe Harbor" like M365 Copilot offers a superior tool that naturally cuts down the use of Shadow AI. 7. Continuous Ops: Monitoring & Regulatory Audit Security is not a “set and forget” project, particularly with the EU AI Act on the horizon. Correlating AI interactions and DLP alerts in Microsoft Sentinel using Purview Audit (specifically the CopilotInteraction logs) data allows for real-time responses. Automated SOAR playbooks can then trigger protective actions - such as revoking an Agent ID - if an entity attempts to access sensitive HR or financial data. Final Thoughts Securing AI at scale is an architectural shift. By layering Identity, Session Governance, and Agentic Identity, AI moves from being a fragmented risk to a governed tool that actually works for the modern workplace.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=400Secure and govern AI apps and agents with Microsoft Purview
The Microsoft Purview family is here to help you secure and govern data across third party IaaS and Saas, multi-platform data environment, while helping you meet compliance requirements you may be subject to. Purview brings simplicity with a comprehensive set of solutions built on a platform of shared capabilities, that helps keep your most important asset, data, safe. With the introduction of AI technology, Purview also expanded its data coverage to include discovering, protecting, and governing the interactions of AI apps and agents, such as Microsoft Copilots like Microsoft 365 Copilot and Security Copilot, Enterprise built AI apps like Chat GPT enterprise, and other consumer AI apps like DeepSeek, accessed through the browser. To help you view, investigate interactions with all those AI apps, and to create and manage policies to secure and govern them in one centralized place, we have launched Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI. You can learn more about DSPM for AI here with short video walkthroughs: Learn how Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI provides data security and compliance protections for Copilots and other generative AI apps | Microsoft Learn Purview capabilities for AI apps and agents To understand our current set of capabilities within Purview to discover, protect, and govern various AI apps and agents, please refer to our Learn doc here: Microsoft Purview data security and compliance protections for Microsoft 365 Copilot and other generative AI apps | Microsoft Learn Here is a quick reference guide for the capabilities available today: Note that currently, DLP for Copilot and adhering to sensitivity label are currently designed to protect content in Microsoft 365. Thus, Security Copilot and Copilot in Fabric, along with Copilot studio custom agents that do not use Microsoft 365 as a content source, do not have these features available. Please see list of AI sites supported by Microsoft Purview DSPM for AI here Conclusion Microsoft Purview can help you discover, protect, and govern the prompts and responses from AI applications in Microsoft Copilot experiences, Enterprise AI apps, and other AI apps through its data security and data compliance solutions, while allowing you to view, investigate, and manage interactions in one centralized place in DSPM for AI. Follow up reading Check out the deployment guides for DSPM for AI How to deploy DSPM for AI - https://aka.ms/DSPMforAI/deploy How to use DSPM for AI data risk assessment to address oversharing - https://aka.ms/dspmforai/oversharing Address oversharing concerns with Microsoft 365 blueprint - aka.ms/Copilot/Oversharing Explore the Purview SDK Microsoft Purview SDK Public Preview | Microsoft Community Hub (blog) Microsoft Purview documentation - purview-sdk | Microsoft Learn Build secure and compliant AI applications with Microsoft Purview (video) References for DSPM for AI Microsoft Purview data security and compliance protections for Microsoft 365 Copilot and other generative AI apps | Microsoft Learn Considerations for deploying Microsoft Purview AI Hub and data security and compliance protections for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot | Microsoft Learn Block Users From Sharing Sensitive Information to Unmanaged AI Apps Via Edge on Managed Devices (preview) | Microsoft Learn as part of Scenario 7 of Create and deploy a data loss prevention policy | Microsoft Learn Commonly used properties in Copilot audit logs - Audit logs for Copilot and AI activities | Microsoft Learn Supported AI sites by Microsoft Purview for data security and compliance protections | Microsoft Learn Where Copilot usage data is stored and how you can audit it - Microsoft 365 Copilot data protection and auditing architecture | Microsoft Learn Downloadable whitepaper: Data Security for AI Adoption | Microsoft Explore the roadmap for DSPM for AI Public roadmap for DSPM for AI - Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365PMPurUncover 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 blogIgnite 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.Introducing 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 SecurityIntroducing Microsoft Security Store
Security is being reengineered for the AI era—moving beyond static, rulebound controls and after-the-fact response toward platform-led, machine-speed defense. We recognize that defending against modern threats requires the full strength of an ecosystem, combining our unique expertise and shared threat intelligence. But with so many options out there, it’s tough for security professionals to cut through the noise, and even tougher to navigate long procurement cycles and stitch together tools and data before seeing meaningful improvements. That’s why we built Microsoft Security Store - a storefront designed for security professionals to discover, buy, and deploy security SaaS solutions and AI agents from our ecosystem partners such as Darktrace, Illumio, and BlueVoyant. Security SaaS solutions and AI agents on Security Store integrate with Microsoft Security products, including Sentinel platform, to enhance end-to-end protection. These integrated solutions and agents collaborate intelligently, sharing insights and leveraging AI to enhance critical security tasks like triage, threat hunting, and access management. In Security Store, you can: Buy with confidence – Explore solutions and agents that are validated to integrate with Microsoft Security products, so you know they’ll work in your environment. Listings are organized to make it easy for security professionals to find what’s relevant to their needs. For example, you can filter solutions based on how they integrate with your existing Microsoft Security products. You can also browse listings based on their NIST Cybersecurity Framework functions, covering everything from network security to compliance automation — helping you quickly identify which solutions strengthen the areas that matter most to your security posture. Simplify purchasing – Buy solutions and agents with your existing Microsoft billing account without any additional payment setup. For Azure benefit-eligible offers, eligible purchases contribute to your cloud consumption commitments. You can also purchase negotiated deals through private offers. Accelerate time to value – Deploy agents and their dependencies in just a few steps and start getting value from AI in minutes. Partners offer ready-to-use AI agents that can triage alerts at scale, analyze and retrieve investigation insights in real time, and surface posture and detection gaps with actionable recommendations. A rich ecosystem of solutions and AI agents to elevate security posture In Security Store, you’ll find solutions covering every corner of cybersecurity—threat protection, data security and governance, identity and device management, and more. To give you a flavor of what is available, here are some of the exciting solutions on the store: Darktrace’s ActiveAI Security SaaS solution integrates with Microsoft Security to extend self-learning AI across a customer's entire digital estate, helping detect anomalies and stop novel attacks before they spread. The Darktrace Email Analysis Agent helps SOC teams triage and threat hunt suspicious emails by automating detection of risky attachments, links, and user behaviors using Darktrace Self-Learning AI, integrated with Microsoft Defender and Security Copilot. This unified approach highlights anomalous properties and indicators of compromise, enabling proactive threat hunting and faster, more accurate response. Illumio for Microsoft Sentinel combines Illumio Insights with Microsoft Sentinel data lake and Security Copilot to enhance detection and response to cyber threats. It fuses data from Illumio and all the other sources feeding into Sentinel to deliver a unified view of threats across millions of workloads. AI-driven breach containment from Illumio gives SOC analysts, incident responders, and threat hunters unified visibility into lateral traffic threats and attack paths across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, to reduce alert fatigue, prioritize threat investigation, and instantly isolate workloads. Netskope’s Security Service Edge (SSE) platform integrates with Microsoft M365, Defender, Sentinel, Entra and Purview for identity-driven, label-aware protection across cloud, web, and private apps. Netskope's inline controls (SWG, CASB, ZTNA) and advanced DLP, with Entra signals and Conditional Access, provide real-time, context-rich policies based on user, device, and risk. Telemetry and incidents flow into Defender and Sentinel for automated enrichment and response, ensuring unified visibility, faster investigations, and consistent Zero Trust protection for cloud, data, and AI everywhere. PERFORMANTA Email Analysis Agent automates deep investigations into email threats, analyzing metadata (headers, indicators, attachments) against threat intelligence to expose phishing attempts. Complementing this, the IAM Supervisor Agent triages identity risks by scrutinizing user activity for signs of credential theft, privilege misuse, or unusual behavior. These agents deliver unified, evidence-backed reports directly to you, providing instant clarity and slashing incident response time. Tanium Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM) pairs realtime endpoint visibility with AI-driven automation to keep IT environments healthy and secure at scale. Tanium is integrated with the Microsoft Security suite—including Microsoft Sentinel, Defender for Endpoint, Entra ID, Intune, and Security Copilot. Tanium streams current state telemetry into Microsoft’s security and AI platforms and lets analysts pivot from investigation to remediation without tool switching. Tanium even executes remediation actions from the Sentinel console. The Tanium Security Triage Agent accelerates alert triage, enabling security teams to make swift, informed decisions using Tanium Threat Response alerts and real-time endpoint data. Walkthrough of Microsoft Security Store Now that you’ve seen the types of solutions available in Security Store, let’s walk through how to find the right one for your organization. You can get started by going to the Microsoft Security Store portal. From there, you can search and browse solutions that integrate with Microsoft Security products, including a dedicated section for AI agents—all in one place. If you are using Microsoft Security Copilot, you can also open the store from within Security Copilot to find AI agents - read more here. Solutions are grouped by how they align with industry frameworks like NIST CSF 2.0, making it easier to see which areas of security each one supports. You can also filter by integration type—e.g., Defender, Sentinel, Entra, or Purview—and by compliance certifications to narrow results to what fits your environment. To explore a solution, click into its detail page to view descriptions, screenshots, integration details, and pricing. For AI agents, you’ll also see the tasks they perform, the inputs they require, and the outputs they produce —so you know what to expect before you deploy. Every listing goes through a review process that includes partner verification, security scans on code packages stored in a secure registry to protect against malware, and validation that integrations with Microsoft Security products work as intended. Customers with the right permissions can purchase agents and SaaS solutions directly through Security Store. The process is simple: choose a partner solution or AI agent and complete the purchase in just a few clicks using your existing Microsoft billing account—no new payment setup required. Qualifying SaaS purchases also count toward your Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), helping accelerate budget approvals while adding the security capabilities your organization needs. Security and IT admins can deploy solutions directly from Security Store in just a few steps through a guided experience. The deployment process automatically provisions the resources each solution needs—such as Security Copilot agents and Microsoft Sentinel data lake notebook jobs—so you don’t have to do so manually. Agents are deployed into Security Copilot, which is built with security in mind, providing controls like granular agent permissions and audit trails, giving admins visibility and governance. Once deployment is complete, your agent is ready to configure and use so you can start applying AI to expand detection coverage, respond faster, and improve operational efficiency. Security and IT admins can view and manage all purchased solutions from the “My Solutions” page and easily navigate to Microsoft Cost Management tools to track spending and manage subscriptions. Partners: grow your business with Microsoft For security partners, Security Store opens a powerful new channel to reach customers, monetize differentiated solutions, and grow with Microsoft. We will showcase select solutions across relevant Microsoft Security experiences, starting with Security Copilot, so your offerings appear in the right context for the right audience. You can monetize both SaaS solutions and AI agents through built-in commerce capabilities, while tapping into Microsoft’s go-to-market incentives. For agent builders, it’s even simpler—we handle the entire commerce lifecycle, including billing and entitlement, so you don’t have to build any infrastructure. You focus on embedding your security expertise into the agent, and we take care of the rest to deliver a seamless purchase experience for customers. Security Store is built on top of Microsoft Marketplace, which means partners publish their solution or agent through the Microsoft Partner Center - the central hub for managing all marketplace offers. From there, create or update your offer with details about how your solution integrates with Microsoft Security so customers can easily discover it in Security Store. Next, upload your deployable package to the Security Store registry, which is encrypted for protection. Then define your license model, terms, and pricing so customers know exactly what to expect. Before your offer goes live, it goes through certification checks that include malware and virus scans, schema validation, and solution validation. These steps help give customers confidence that your solutions meet Microsoft’s integration standards. Get started today By creating a storefront optimized for security professionals, we are making it simple to find, buy, and deploy solutions and AI agents that work together. Microsoft Security Store helps you put the right AI‑powered tools in place so your team can focus on what matters most—defending against attackers with speed and confidence. Get started today by visiting Microsoft Security Store. If you’re a partner looking to grow your business with Microsoft, start by visiting Microsoft Security Store - Partner with Microsoft to become a partner. Partners can list their solution or agent if their solution has a qualifying integration with Microsoft Security products, such as a Sentinel connector or Security Copilot agent, or another qualifying MISA solution integration. You can learn more about qualifying integrations and the listing process in our documentation here.
Java MIP SDK 1.17.154: commitAsync() TemplateNotFoundError (C# OK; Java fails Win & Ubuntu)
TL;DR Java SDK 1.17.154: calling setLabel() then commitAsync() fails with TemplateNotFoundError (TemplateId=2ea3c830-...). Same label/code works on Java 1.16.x and C# 1.17.154. Policy cache cleared, templates/labels verified, token/tenant checked—issue persists. Environment SDK (Java): 1.16.x (OK), 1.17.154 (FAIL) SDK (C#): 1.17.154 (OK) OS (Java): Windows 10/11 (win32 build), Ubuntu 20.04 / 22.04 / 24.04 Java: Corretto/OpenJDK 17.0.16 (x64) Service/Tenant: Microsoft Purview Information Protection Auth: (e.g., user delegated token / app-only token) Code Snippet (Java) // Label apply options LabelingOptions labelingOptions = new LabelingOptions(); labelingOptions.setAssignmentMethod(AssignmentMethod.PRIVILEGED); labelingOptions.setDowngradeJustified(true); labelingOptions.setJustificationMessage("Label Apply"); // Get label Label label = fileEngine.getLabelById(labelId); // Apply label (no explicit template handling) fileHandler.setLabel(label, labelingOptions, new ProtectionSettings()); // Commit File workFile = new File(domainFolder, UidUtil.makeUid()); CompletableFuture<Boolean> commitFuture = fileHandler.commitAsync(workFile.getAbsolutePath()); commitFuture.get(); // <-- Throws TemplateNotFoundError on 1.17.154 Stack trace excerpt: Caused by: com.microsoft.informationprotection.internal.gen.Error: TemplateNotFoundError: Could not find template with id: 2ea3c830-5a0e-4eea-b48b-c72186d453c0, BadInputError.Code=General, CorrelationId=42ffaad4-3a0f-4986-ba9d-b5a79c5fd076 (ProtectionEngine), CorrelationId=16819f70-e419-473f-9895-c756f3dd5e4b (FileHandler) at com.microsoft.informationprotection.internal.gen.SdkWrapperJNI.SwigDirector_FileHandler_Observer_OnCommitFailure(SdkWrapperJNI.java:2688) Expected Behavior setLabel() should apply the label (and its protection) and commit successfully, as it does in Java 1.16 and C# 1.17.154. Actual Behavior commitAsync() fails with TemplateNotFoundError for the GUID referenced by the label’s ApplyProtectionAction. What I’ve Tried Policy/cache refresh: Deleted %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\MSIP\ / ~/.mip/, reloaded engine. Template/label verification: Confirmed existence and publish scope in Purview portal & via PowerShell/Graph. Label actions check: policyEngine.getLabelActions(labelId) shows an ApplyProtectionAction with that GUID. Token/tenant sanity check: Correct scopes and same tenant. Rollback test: Java 1.16 works; C# 1.17.154 works. Questions Any breaking change in Java 1.17 regarding how protection templates are resolved during setLabel()? Is this a known issue specific to Java SDK 1.17.154 (win32 & Ubuntu 20/22/24 builds)? Should we now explicitly use ProtectionDescriptor / SetProtection() in Java? Can someone review the service logs using the CorrelationIds above? Happy to provide additional logs, PowerShell/Graph queries, or action dumps if needed. Thanks!New Microsoft Purview Deployment Blueprint | Lightweight guide to mitigate data leakage
We’re excited to share our latest Data Security deployment blueprint: “Lightweight guide to mitigate data leakage”—a practical resource designed to help organizations quickly enable core data security features across their Microsoft 365 estate with minimal setup. The blueprint follows a good / better / best model that maps protections to your licensing. “Good” highlights foundational features included in Business Premium SKUs, while “Better” and “Best” layer in advanced E5 Compliance capabilities, such as auto-labeling, Endpoint DLP, insider risk signals and much more. With the new E5 Compliance Add-On for Business Premium, this guide shows how organizations can capture quick wins today while building toward stronger, long-term security practices. This blueprint is designed for IT administrators, security teams, and compliance stakeholders tasked with protecting sensitive data – and it’s equally valuable for Microsoft partners and consultants supporting customers on their data security journey. Whether you’re enabling basic safeguards or advancing towards automated protection, this guide provides clear, actionable steps to strengthen your data security posture. Ready to get started? Visit our Purview deployment blueprint page or jump straight to the direct PPT link for a step-by-step walkthrough. Securing your data doesn’t have to be complex – this lightweight blueprint makes it achievable for organizations of any size.Elevating Trust in Data through Data Quality in the AI Era
Data collection and utilization are growing rapidly, and organizations are increasingly relying on data as they transition into the era of AI. However, many face significant challenges in effectively managing investments across cloud, data, and AI. This is largely due to a lack of visibility across their entire data estate—which is often fragmented across silos, heterogeneous systems, on-premises environments, and the cloud. Concerns about data trustworthiness, AI-readiness, and uncertainty around security and compliance further complicate the ability to drive timely business insights. Elevating data quality means going beyond merely identifying issues—it's about equipping data stewards, analysts, and engineers with the right tools to proactively improve trust, consistency, and readiness of data for AI, analytics, and operations. Despite the critical importance of data quality, many organizations struggle to activate the full value of their data estate. Research shows that 75% of companies do not have a formal data quality program. This is alarming, especially as data quality has become a cornerstone of successful AI initiatives. Simply put: your AI is only as good as your data. In the past, when humans were always in the loop, minor data quality issues could be corrected manually. But in today’s world—where AI interprets not just the structure but the content of the data—any inconsistencies, inaccuracies, or noncompliance in the data can directly lead to flawed insights, unreliable AI outputs, and poor business decisions. Bad data can make your AI wrong. It can make your BI reports misleading. And it can impact your organization's credibility—as well as your reputation as a data professional. After all, there’s nothing worse than building something that no one trusts or uses. That’s why defining and deploying a robust data quality framework is more critical now than ever before. Organizations must establish a data quality maturity model, track quality across their data estate, and take continuous improvement and remediation actions. Key steps to maintaining data quality and ensuring the health of your data estate include: Define the scope – Identify which data is needed for specific business use cases. Measure quality – Assess whether data meets expected standards. Analyze findings – Understand patterns, gaps, and root causes. Improve quality – Take corrective actions to meet business needs. Control quality – Continuously monitor and govern data to maintain high standards. To ensure your data is fit for purpose, it's essential to establish strong data quality practices within your organization, supported by the right tools, roles, and governance structures. Profile your data to understand the distribution Data profiling is the process of analyzing data to understand its structure, content, and quality. It helps uncover patterns, anomalies, missing values, duplicates, and data types—providing valuable insight into the trustworthiness and usability of data for analytics, decision-making, and quality improvement. By examining datasets for structure, relationships, and inconsistencies, data practitioners can identify potential issues and define validation rules for ongoing data quality assurance. Microsoft Purview Unified Data Catalog provides an integrated data quality experience that supports profiling as a foundational step. With Purview, users can profile data to understand its distribution, patterns, and data types—helping inform data quality programs and define rules for continuous monitoring and improvement. Purview's data profiling leverages AI to recommend which columns in a dataset are most critical and should be profiled. Users remain in control and can adjust these recommendations by deselecting suggested columns or adding others. Additionally, all profiling history is preserved, allowing users to compare current profiles with historical patterns to detect changes over time and continuously assess data health. Define and apply rules to validate your data Applying rules and constraints is essential to ensure that data conforms to predefined requirements or business logic—such as data type, completeness, uniqueness, and consistency. Data profiling results can be leveraged to define these rules and validate data continuously, helping ensure that it is trustworthy and ready for both business and AI use cases. To achieve this, data quality should be measured across all stages: data at creation, data in motion, and data at rest. While many CRM and web-based applications perform UI-level validations to check user inputs before submission, a significant amount of poor-quality data still enters systems through bulk upload processes. These low-quality records often bypass front-end checks and propagate downstream through the data supply chain, leading to broader data integrity issues. In Medallion architecture, you can validate and correct data directly in the pipeline. Bad-quality data detected in the bronze layer can trigger notifications to upstream systems to fix issues at the source. Purview Unified Catalog Data Quality capability provides a user-friendly UI for managing data quality rules. You can configure rules for any supported data sources in cloud or on-premises or datasets in Fabric Lakehouse's bronze layer, schedule DQ jobs, and send notifications to data engineers and stewards when issues arise. This proactive monitoring ensures data quality is addressed early—before data progresses through the silver and gold layers of your architecture. Visualizing Data Quality Metrics and Driving Action Visualizing data quality metrics and trends provides critical insights into the overall health of your data and supports informed, data-driven decision-making. Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog publishes all metadata—including data quality rules and scores—into Fabric OneLake. Data analysts can link Purview metadata with raw data to generate actionable insights. They can also leverage Fabric AI skills to enhance intelligence and integrate with Data Activator to trigger notifications for upstream data publishers and downstream consumers. Alerts and notifications can be configured directly in the Purview Unified Catalog. Data stewards can set thresholds for one or many data assets to automatically notify upstream and downstream contacts if those thresholds are breached. Notifications can be directed to specific individuals or groups (e.g., a support team). These alerts empower data providers to resolve issues at the source, and data engineers can address problems within the bronze layer of their analytical storage—such as in Microsoft Fabric. Additionally, alerts can be used to pause data movement from the bronze to the silver and gold layers, ensuring only high-quality data flows downstream. Users can configure the storage location in the Purview Data Quality solution to publish failed or error records. This allows data stewards and data engineers to review and fix issues, improving data quality before using it for analytics or as input for ML model training. Integrated Data Observability with Data Quality Scores Data observability in Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog offers a comprehensive, bird’s-eye view into the health of the data estate as data flows across various sources. Data stewards, domain experts, and those responsible for data health can monitor their entire data landscape from a single unified interface. This centralized view provides visibility into data lineage—from source to consumption—and reveals how data assets map to governance domains. It enables users to understand where data originates and terminates, pinpoint data quality issues, and assess the impact on reporting and compliance obligations. By consolidating metadata into a single, accessible location, users can explore how data quality is evolving, track usage patterns, and understand who is interacting with the data. With full visibility across the data estate, both central and federated data teams can efficiently identify opportunities to improve metadata quality, clarify ownership, enhance data quality, and optimize data architecture. Summary Defining and implementing a data quality framework has become more critical than ever. Organizations must establish a data quality maturity model and continuously monitor the health of their data estate to enable ongoing improvement and remediation. Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog empowers governance domain owners and data stewards to assess and manage data quality across the ecosystem, driving informed and targeted improvements. In today’s AI-driven world, the trustworthiness of data is directly linked to the effectiveness of AI insights and recommendations. Unreliable data not only weakens AI outcomes but can also diminish trust in the systems themselves and slow their adoption. Poor data quality or inconsistent data structures can disrupt business operations and impair decision-making. Microsoft Purview addresses these challenges with a no-code/low-code approach to defining data quality rules—including out-of-the-box (OOB) and AI-generated rules. These rules are applied at the column level and rolled up into scores at the data asset, data product, and governance domain levels, offering full visibility into data quality across the enterprise. Purview’s AI-powered data profiling capabilities intelligently recommend which columns to profile, while still allowing human review and refinement. This human-in-the-loop process not only improves the relevance and accuracy of profiling but also feeds back into improving AI model performance over time. Elevating data quality is more than identifying problems—it's about equipping stewards, analysts, and engineers with the tools to proactively build trust, ensure consistency, and prepare data for AI, analytics, and business success.
