Couverture de How to Audit User Activity with Microsoft Purview

How to Audit User Activity with Microsoft Purview

How to Audit User Activity with Microsoft Purview

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 Ever wondered what your team is really doing in Microsoft 365? Not in a micromanaging way, but from a compliance and security perspective? The truth is, without auditing, you’re flying blind—especially in a hybrid world where sensitive data moves faster than ever. Today, we’re going to show you how Microsoft Purview lets you actually see what’s happening behind the scenes. Are your audit logs catching what matters most—or are you missing the signs of a risk that could cost you? Let’s find out.Why Visibility Matters More Than EverYour organization might be tracking logins, but do you know who’s opening sensitive files at two in the morning? That’s the gap so many companies miss. It’s easy to feel like activity is covered when you see pretty dashboard charts of active users and sign-ins, but that barely scratches the surface of what’s actually happening in your environment. The shift to hybrid work has been great for flexibility, but it’s also made user activity harder to monitor. People are connecting from personal devices, home networks you don’t control, and cloud apps that blur the boundary between what lives in your tenant and what gets shared outside of it. The lines are fuzzier than ever, and so are the risks.Most companies assume the built-in usage reports in Microsoft 365 are the same thing as audit logs. They’re not. Usage reports might tell you that a OneDrive file was accessed five times, but they rarely tell you which user accessed it, under what session, or from where. That’s like checking the odometer on your car—sure, you know how many miles were driven, but you have no idea who was behind the wheel. It looks good until your compliance officer asks for precise accountability, and suddenly you realize those gaps aren’t just minor oversights. They can turn into questions you can’t answer.Imagine this scenario: your legal department asks you to provide a clear account of who viewed and copied financial records last quarter. Maybe there’s an investigation, maybe it’s just part of due diligence. If all you have is a roll-up report or email activity stats, you’ll find yourself staring at incomplete data that fails to answer the actual question. When you can’t meet that level of detail, the issue shifts from inconvenience to liability. The ability to trace actions back to individual users, with a timeline, is no longer a nice-to-have capability—it’s the baseline expectation.Then you have the pressure of regulations stacked on top. Frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and industry-specific mandates demand that organizations keep detailed records of user activity. They aren’t satisfied with generic counts and summaries; they want traceability, accountability, and proof. Regulators don’t care if your portal makes things look secure. They care about evidence—clear logs of who did what, when they did it, and in many cases, from what device or IP. If you can’t produce that, you can end up with everything from fines to litigation risk. And fines are the visible part—damage to reputation or client trust is often far worse.Without strong auditing, blind spots put you in danger two ways. One is regulatory exposure, where you simply cannot produce the information required. The other is making it easier for insider threats to slip by unnoticed. You may catch a brute force login attempt against an MFA-protected account, but would you notice a trusted user quietly exporting mailbox data to a PST file? If you don’t have the right granularity in your logs, some of those actions blend into the background and never raise alarms. That’s what makes blind spots so dangerous—they hide activity in plain sight.It’s like setting up a building with security cameras at the front door, but all those cameras do is mark that “someone entered.” You have absolutely no view of whether they walked straight to the lobby or broke into the records room. That kind of system satisfies nobody. You wouldn’t feel safe in that building, and you wouldn’t trust it to host sensitive conversations or high-value assets. Yet many IT organizations operate this way because they don’t realize their current reports offer that same shallow view.The good news is that Microsoft Purview closes those gaps. Rather than siloed or surface-level data, it gives structured visibility into activity happening across Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, Power BI, and more. It doesn’t just say “a user connected”—it captures the actions they performed. That difference moves you from broad usage stats to fine-grained audit trails you can actually stand behind.At this point, it’s clear that auditing user activity isn’t optional anymore. It’s not just about checking a compliance box—it’s the shield protecting both trust and accountability in your organization. When you can show exactly who did what, you reduce risk, strengthen investigations, and put yourself in a position where regulators ...
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