Microsoft Purview Audit: Activity Logging, Investigation, and 10-Year Retention
Audit consulting for enterprises — activity logging across all M365 workloads including Copilot, investigation with search and filtering, audit log retention up to 10 years with Premium, and the audit strategy that supports security investigation, regulatory compliance, and insider risk detection.
Activity Logging
Audit logs capturing user and admin activity across Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Entra ID, Copilot — the evidentiary record for investigation and compliance.
Audit Search & Investigation
Search and filtering with date ranges, users, activities, and workloads — the investigation capability security and compliance teams use for incident response.
10-Year Retention
Audit Premium with up to 10-year log retention — the retention duration SEC, FINRA, HIPAA, and certain state requirements mandate for regulated organizations.
Copilot Audit
Audit logging for Copilot interactions — capturing prompts, responses, and data access patterns that investigation and compliance require for AI-generated content.
Why 180-Day Audit Retention Creates Investigation Gaps
Capabilities We Implement
Audit Retention Strategy
Retention policies mapped to regulatory requirements — SEC, FINRA, HIPAA, SOX, state regulations — with Audit Premium configuration for the retention duration each regulation mandates.
Investigation Workflows
Search and filtering workflows for common investigation patterns — security incident timeline, user activity reconstruction, data access forensics, and the saved searches that accelerate investigation.
Alert Policies & SIEM Integration
Alert policies for high-risk activities (mailbox access by delegates, large file downloads, admin role changes), integration with Microsoft Sentinel, and the monitoring cadence that surfaces incidents early.
Copilot Audit Configuration
Audit logging for Copilot interactions — prompts, responses, data access, and the investigation capability organizations deploying AI need for compliance and security.
Two Audiences, One Purview Practice
Deploy Purview for Your Organization
We design and deploy Purview for your regulatory requirements and data estate — information protection, DLP, eDiscovery, records management, compliance manager, data governance, and audit.
Start a Consulting Engagement →Scale Your Purview Team
Pre-qualified Purview compliance architects, DLP engineers, eDiscovery specialists, and data governance consultants for your client projects.
Scale Your Purview Team →Frequently Asked Questions
Audit Standard retains logs for 180 days and provides basic search capability. Audit Premium extends retention to 1-10 years, adds higher bandwidth for audit log access, adds audit log retention policies for granular control, and provides access to crucial investigation events. For any regulated organization or organization with security investigation needs, Premium is required. Premium requires M365 E5 or E5 Compliance add-on.
Yes — Copilot interactions are captured in the unified audit log. This includes prompts, responses, and the data sources Copilot accessed to generate responses. Organizations deploying Copilot should include AI interaction audit in their retention strategy because these records may be needed for investigation, compliance review, and regulatory response.
Based on the most demanding regulatory requirement the organization must satisfy. SEC/FINRA typically requires 6 years. HIPAA requires 6 years. SOX requires 7 years. Some state regulations extend further. We recommend the longest applicable requirement plus a margin. The cost of Premium retention is significantly less than the cost of an investigation gap.
Yes — M365 audit logs integrate with Microsoft Sentinel for SIEM correlation. This enables security teams to correlate M365 activity with network, endpoint, and cloud activity in a single investigation view. We configure the Sentinel connector and the detection rules that surface M365-specific threats.
10-Year Retention.
Zero Investigation Gaps.
Retention strategy, investigation workflows, Copilot audit — audit configured so the next investigation has the full timeline.