AvePoint vs. Microsoft Purview: Better Together for Complete Data Protection and Governance

When it comes to securing and governing data in Microsoft 365, IT and security teams are asking an important question: If I’m already using Microsoft Purview, do I still need AvePoint?  

It’s a fair question, and one we hear often. The short answer? Yes, if you want to move from knowing where your risks are to actually fixing them.  

Microsoft Purview provides a powerful foundation for data security, compliance, and information protection. It helps prevent data loss, encrypts sensitive files, ensures regulatory compliance, and manages insider risk. However, as your collaboration environment grows more complex – with thousands of workspaces, users, and apps generating unstructured data every day – you also need operational governance, visibility, and control over the sprawl.  

That is where AvePoint adds value. This blog breaks down the differences between AvePoint and Microsoft Purview and how they work better together to deliver complete data protection and governance across Microsoft 365.

Purview and AvePoint: Covering Different Layers of Risk  

Microsoft Purview plays a vital role in any Microsoft 365 security strategy. It provides the visibility and policy enforcement needed to protect sensitive data at the document level. With native capabilities built into the Microsoft ecosystem, Purview helps organizations meet compliance requirements and prevent inappropriate data exposure.

TL; DR: Purview’s strengths lie in helping organizations understand what data they have, how sensitive it is, and when it’s being accessed. It enables you to:

• Apply sensitivity labels to classify content and enforce access policies.
• Encrypt files and emails to protect information at the point of sharing.
• Support regulatory compliance through built-in policy frameworks.
• Implement data loss prevention (DLP) and insider risk policies to detect and prevent data leaks.
• Monitor user and content activities across Microsoft 365 and integrated endpoints.

These are critical controls — and if you’re not using them yet, you absolutely should be.

While Purview controls what happens at the point of creation, access, or sharing, AvePoint extends governance and protection across the full lifecycle of workspaces, content, and collaboration.

With AvePoint, you can:

• Govern workspaces, apps, and users in Microsoft 365 (Teams, SharePoint, Groups, etc.).
• Add and maintain business context to content to help apply the right labels and policies that Purview can enforce.
• Enforce and maintain configurations so that policies stay applied over time.
• Automate the lifecycle of Microsoft 365 resources from creation, ownership, recertification, and expiry of content, Workspaces, and applications.
• Monitor for configuration drift or policy violations and take automated action to address them.
• Support classification and tagging at scale, even for older or externally migrated content.

Together, Purview and AvePoint ensure not just secure data, but a secure collaboration environment.

Teams Lifecycle and Sensitivity Labels in Action

Let’s say a user creates a Microsoft Team chat and shares files with external collaborators. A Purview policy to encrypt those files and apply a sensitivity label was applied — great!

But what if:

• The Team has no active owner, and no one monitors who joins?
• The external user is still active six months later, long after the project ended?
• The Team’s privacy setting was changed and now it’s public?
• Someone deleted the label and uploaded unclassified data?

This is NOT a failure of Purview. Purview is just solving different parts of the security puzzle. And this is where AvePoint comes in.

AvePoint ensures:

• That Team is provisioned with the right settings from day one.
• Ownership and access are recertified regularly.
• Changes in configuration are flagged and remediated.
• Data is re-labeled or cleaned up automatically as policies evolve.

Purview provides the visibility and file-level protections. AvePoint ensures those protections are consistently enforced across users, workspaces, and collaboration lifecycles.

Where AvePoint and Purview Work Together:

The Bottom Line: A Unified Governance Approach

If you're serious about protecting your Microsoft 365 environment, Microsoft Purview and AvePoint are not competitors; they complement each other.

Purview gives you the security and compliance backbone you need at the file, email, and device level.  

AvePoint provides granular controls, automation, and operational governance to keep your collaboration environment healthy, sustainable, and secure over time, working hand-in-hand with Purview.

Together, they deliver a complete story — one that’s proactive, scalable, and built for the way collaboration happens today.

Ready to Go Beyond Policy?

AvePoint has been working alongside Microsoft for over 20 years to enhance and extend native Microsoft 365 capabilities and help organizations around the world manage and protect their collaboration data.

Let’s show you how AvePoint and Microsoft Purview can work better together in your environment.