Leading Financial Services Company Delivers Enterprise-Grade Transformation with Microsoft

Data protection is a vital cornerstone for a successful enterprise adoption of generative AI, ensuring secure and effective integration of advanced technologies. This global financial services leader, serving millions of customers worldwide, recognised early in its technology modernisation journey that robust data security is essential for seamlessly incorporating AI into its core processes, enabling trustworthy and efficient AI model deployment.

Protiviti’s involvement in this project stemmed from our established reputation. We led a major data protection initiative in the manufacturing industry sector, demonstrating our expertise in architecting, deploying, and delivering one of Microsoft’s most significant data protection transformations to date. This achievement caught the attention of Microsoft’s account team, leading to our engagement with this project.

As the client worked to eliminate technical debt and enable AI capabilities like Microsoft Copilot, they faced critical challenges, including encrypted data that Microsoft Purview could not access and which lacked essential DLP controls. Their outdated, redundant encryption technologies created operational conflicts, diminished user experience, and blocked streamlining and creation of a unified cybersecurity posture.

Accelerators and a multi-phased approach

Given the specific challenges the client faced with legacy technologies, we identified how we would deliver effective solutions:

Leveraging proprietary technology developed through years of data migration and protection work, we built a solution capable of scanning, decrypting, re-encrypting, and restoring files at scale, preserving metadata and chain of custody. This tool, uniquely customised for the client’s requirements, formed the foundation for a transformative multi-workstream engagement.

The work was divided into four major phases:

• Deploying the encryption remediation utility to identify and decrypt files impacted by legacy tools.
• Rolling out Microsoft Purview Information Protection (MIP) sensitivity labels to over 98,000 users, ensuring a seamless and policy-aligned transition to Microsoft-native encryption.
• Analysing and consolidating over 350 legacy DLP policies down to 65 streamlined policies deployed within Microsoft Purview DLP—simplifying policy management and enhancing control.
• Implementing AI governance and security controls to prepare the organisation for safe, secure, and compliant Copilot adoption.

Change is good … but requires training

Recognising the importance of user adoption, we also developed and conducted extensive administrator and end-user training sessions for the client’s staff. These sessions covered best practices for data handling and security, how to effectively use new tools and a session dedicated to understanding and adhering to newly implemented data governance policies. We also provided change management support to ensure a smooth transition to the new system and foster a culture of data security and compliance within the organisation.

Long-standing partnership yields results

The migration of legacy encrypted files to Microsoft Purview, a unified classification and encryption platform, improved and simplified the overall end-user experience for over 98,000 users, and generated immediate savings to the client of $1 million+ in third-party license costs. Modernising the client’s data loss prevention policies, we consolidated and streamlined over 350 data loss prevention policies to a more manageable 65.

This engagement exemplifies how Protiviti brings together deep technical expertise, agile IP development, and robust organisational change management to deliver enterprise-grade digital transformation while meeting complex regulatory and operational requirements typical of global financial institutions.

As one of Microsoft’s most trusted partners, Protiviti continues to build solutions that are not only innovative and utilise A-enabled capabilities, but sustainable and scalable—meeting clients exactly where they are and helping them lead the way forward.