Since around 2013, Microsoft has come under a fair amount of fire for product names lacking more pizazz. Amazon has dreamscape names like "elastic horsepants boogie" or something (IDK, I don't do AWS). Still, Microsoft took a profoundly staid approach to naming new products, like calling their CASB "Cloud App Security" or their endpoint management solution "Endpoint Manager." Heady stuff.
But I really liked the simplicity. I have absolutely no clue what elastic horsepants are, but I don't have to do any research to understand what Azure Virtual Machines are. Simple, straightforward, uncomplicated.
Except…was it, really? The product names may have been, but the relationships between them and understanding why one would be in one bundle and another in a different technology stack was…tough. Everybody may know that Azure Active Directory is Microsoft's cloud identity management solution, but explaining the differences between P1 and P2 and then adding in bolt-on capabilities and new features thru seemingly-unrelated products gave folks the impression that Azure AD was limited to identity management when there's a whole wealth of access controls and credential management toolsets that tie in directly.
And I've written before about how many different things "DLP" can mean to different people and how those different meanings were all serviced out of various tools, except now they're kinda not: it's all bits & pieces of the Purview family. And that makes so much more sense to align capabilities to product family names, even if there's no projected change to licensing structures.
So now that question of "you got that sweet DLP?" gets a more straightforward answer: "yeah, buddy: check out Purview!" Granted, there are 16 products under the Purview namespace, and we will cover a lot of those functionalities as a unified toolset in our upcoming webinar on June 16.
Entra, similarly, organizes all of the identity & access management controls into a single product family, again with no projected licensing changes. I've had lengthy discussions with folks in the past about what I believe was the misstep of capitalizing on the brand name of "Active Directory" to establish Microsoft's cloud identity solution. In fact, I think it probably should have been named precisely that: cloud identity. Because that trade-dress caused immense confusion and possible distrust. Entra doesn't change the "Azure Active Directory" part of the story, but it clarifies that it's just "part of this complete breakfast" of IAM components available in the Microsoft cloud.
And that complete breakfast is growing. One of the biggest areas of customer interest this year has been Identity Governance, an Azure AD capability that allows organizations to serve up apps, sites, and teams in packages that can be delivered to internal or external users, including access reviews, approvals, separation of duty capabilities, and will soon include fully-automated identity lifecycle management, building on the already amazing abilities to disable guest accounts with no specified privileges and identify and delete stale internal and guest accounts.
Priva wraps up your core compliance controls for privacy rights into a single workspace. Viva brings together all the workplace wellness tools of MyAnalytics, bits of Delve, and some entirely new content.
Would you like to find out more about Microsoft Purview? Learn how you can manage & govern on-premises, multicloud, & SaaS data with Microsoft Purview today.