Traditional security was designed for a time when employees worked at desks and data stayed on company servers. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Today, your team works from coffee shops, collaborates with partners across the country, and uses AI tools to work faster. This flexibility drives your business forward. But what you might not realize is that every time someone downloads a file, forwards an email, or shares a document with an external partner, your sensitive information leaves your control, and your current security can’t follow it.

This creates scenarios that should keep you up at night.

The Risks of Modern Work

Consider these scenarios that happen in businesses every day:

Scenario 1: The Departing Employee Risk

Your operations manager resigns. She’s been with you for eight years and has access to everything – client lists, pricing strategies, process documentation, financial projections.

Before she leaves, she copies files she thinks might be useful in her next role. When she starts working for your competitor three weeks later, she brings all that knowledge with her.

Scenario 2: The Accidental Share Risk

Your team is negotiating a major contract. Someone drafts the proposal that includes your pricing and strategy. They email it to the internal team for review but accidentally include an external email address in the “To” field.

By the time anyone notices, your competitor knows exactly what you’re proposing and to whom.

Scenario 3: The AI Convenience Risk

Your marketing team discovers that ChatGPT writes great copy. They start feeding it customer data, product strategies, and competitive analysis to generate content faster.

They don’t know they’ve handed your proprietary information to a third-party AI that might use it to train its models, potentially making your competitive intelligence available to anyone who asks the right questions.

Related: Discover how AI policies protect your business from risks

Why Traditional Security Fails

These scenarios reveal the problem. You can’t protect what you can’t see, and you can’t control what you don’t govern.

Traditional security assumes data stays behind your firewall. But your information is on employee laptops, in forwarded emails, and in documents shared with partners.

Access controls work while files are in your systems. Once someone downloads a document or forwards an email, those controls don’t follow.

Monitoring tells you something happened after the damage is done. By then, it’s too late.

All these approaches protect perimeters and systems. None of them protect the information itself. You need security that travels with your data.

Microsoft Purview: Protection That Follows Your Data

Microsoft Purview is one of the tools we use to protect information wherever it travels. It discovers where your sensitive data lives, governs who can use it, and embeds protection that follows the data wherever it goes – on employee devices, in partner systems, shared with AI tools, or copied by departing employees.

With Purview, you shift from protecting perimeters to protecting information.

How Purview Works

1. It discovers and classifies your data, scanning your environment to identify where sensitive information lives, often revealing exposure you didn’t know existed.
2. It governs access and usage, establishing policies for who can use data and how, based on business risk.
3. It protects information wherever it travels, embedding security directly into documents so protection follows the data.

Remember those three scenarios? Here’s what happens when Purview protection is in place:

Scenario 1: The Departing Employee Solution

Purview automatically identifies sensitive information in your documents – contract terms, customer data, financial information, intellectual property. It embeds encryption and access controls directly into each document.

When your operations manager copies those files and leaves, they require authentication every time they’re opened. When you disable her account, the files become unreadable. She has the physical files, but they’re useless without active credentials.

Scenario 2: The Accidental Share Solution

When someone accidentally includes your competitor in that email with your proposal, Purview protection travels with the document. Even though they have a copy, they can’t open it without proper authentication through your Microsoft environment.

Scenario 3: The AI Tool Solution

When your marketing team tries to upload protected documents to ChatGPT, the encryption prevents the AI from accessing the content without proper authentication. Your team can use AI productivity tools while you maintain control over what information those tools can see.

The Business Impact of Purview

Purview changes how you manage the risks of flexible work, external collaboration, and AI adoption. Instead of hoping your security holds or discovering problems too late, you have control.

The result:

• Your team works flexibly. Accidental shares can’t be opened. Downloaded files become unreadable when you revoke access.
• You adopt AI tools without your proprietary information training someone else’s competitive advantage.
• You prove compliance when auditors ask where data went or how long you retained records.

Is Your Security Keeping Up with How Your Team Works?

Most IT providers focus on keeping systems running and monitoring for threats. That’s necessary, but it doesn’t solve the problem of data that constantly leaves your control.

At XPERTECHS, we implement Microsoft Purview as part of our MSP 3.0 approach. This is cybersecurity strategy that matches how your business operates. Protection that follows your data wherever it goes, so your team can work flexibly while you manage risks instead of wondering what’s exposed.

If your current IT team hasn’t brought this up, we should talk.

Get in touch to schedule a conversation about data security