SC-900 Practice Question: Describe the capabilities of Microsoft compliance solutions
A legal team is preparing for an internal investigation related to a potential policy violation. They need to identify all relevant documents stored in Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, but there are millions of items across the organization. The team wants to use a machine learning model that learns from a set of manually reviewed relevant and non-relevant documents to predict relevance and prioritize review. Which Microsoft Purview solution provides this capability?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Insider Risk Management (which also uses machine learning for risk detection) with eDiscovery's predictive coding, but Insider Risk Management targets behavioral patterns and alerts, not document relevance prediction for legal hold and review.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Advanced)
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Advanced) provides predictive coding capabilities that use machine learning to analyze a seed set of manually reviewed relevant and non-relevant documents. The model learns from this training to predict the relevance of millions of items across Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, prioritizing review for internal investigations. This directly matches the need for a machine learning model to identify and prioritize relevant documents.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Why it's wrong here
Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is designed to identify, monitor, and protect sensitive information across various locations, preventing its unauthorized sharing or exfiltration. While DLP uses pattern matching and content inspection to enforce policies, its primary function is proactive data protection and policy enforcement, not post-incident document review or leveraging machine learning for relevance scoring within an investigation workflow. It lacks the advanced analytical tools for sifting through large datasets to find investigative evidence.
When this WOULD be correct
A question asking which Microsoft Purview solution helps prevent sensitive information from being shared via email or SharePoint by applying policies to detect and block unauthorized transfers would make DLP the correct answer.
- ✗
Microsoft Purview Audit (Premium)
Why it's wrong here
Microsoft Purview Audit (Premium) provides comprehensive logging of user and admin activities across Microsoft 365 services, offering forensic evidence for security and compliance investigations. While crucial for understanding *who did what and when*, it is fundamentally a logging and reporting service that provides an immutable record of events. It does not include machine learning algorithms or predictive coding features to analyze the *content* of documents or prioritize them for relevance in an eDiscovery context.
When this WOULD be correct
An organization needs to investigate a security incident and must identify all user activities (e.g., file access, email sends) within a specific time frame across Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. The team requires long-term retention of audit logs and high-bandwidth APIs to export audit data for analysis. In this scenario, Microsoft Purview Audit (Premium) would be the correct answer.
- ✓
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Advanced)
Why this is correct
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Advanced) is the correct solution for internal investigations requiring efficient document review. It incorporates advanced machine learning capabilities, such as predictive coding (also known as Technology Assisted Review or TAR), to intelligently identify and prioritize relevant documents from vast, unstructured data sets. This significantly accelerates the review process by reducing the volume of data human reviewers must examine, ensuring legal teams can focus on the most pertinent information for their case.
- ✗
Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management
Why it's wrong here
Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management is specifically engineered to detect, investigate, and act on malicious or inadvertent risky activities by internal users. It correlates various signals to identify patterns of potentially harmful behavior, such as data exfiltration or policy violations, to mitigate insider threats. However, its core functionality revolves around user behavior analytics and risk scoring, not the machine learning-assisted content review and relevance identification of documents required for a legal investigation.
When this WOULD be correct
A scenario where an organization needs to identify and investigate users who may be engaging in risky activities (e.g., unauthorized data exfiltration, policy violations) by correlating signals from various sources (e.g., DLP alerts, user behavior) would make Insider Risk Management the correct answer.
Option-by-option analysis
Why each answer is right or wrong
Understanding why wrong answers are wrong — and when they would be correct — is what separates a 750 score from a 900. The SC-900 exam frequently reuses these exact scenarios with slightly different constraints.
✓Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Advanced)Correct answer▾
Why this is correct
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Advanced) is the correct solution for internal investigations requiring efficient document review. It incorporates advanced machine learning capabilities, such as predictive coding (also known as Technology Assisted Review or TAR), to intelligently identify and prioritize relevant documents from vast, unstructured data sets. This significantly accelerates the review process by reducing the volume of data human reviewers must examine, ensuring legal teams can focus on the most pertinent information for their case.
✗Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP)Wrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is designed to prevent accidental or unauthorized sharing of sensitive data, not to identify and prioritize relevant documents for legal investigations using machine learning.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
A question asking which Microsoft Purview solution helps prevent sensitive information from being shared via email or SharePoint by applying policies to detect and block unauthorized transfers would make DLP the correct answer.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse DLP's content analysis capabilities with eDiscovery's relevance prediction, assuming that any tool analyzing content can perform document relevance ranking for legal review.
✗Microsoft Purview Audit (Premium)Wrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Microsoft Purview Audit (Premium) provides detailed auditing and investigation of user and admin activities, but it does not include machine learning models to predict document relevance for eDiscovery. The question specifically requires a solution that learns from manually reviewed documents to prioritize review, which is a feature of Advanced eDiscovery, not Audit.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
An organization needs to investigate a security incident and must identify all user activities (e.g., file access, email sends) within a specific time frame across Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. The team requires long-term retention of audit logs and high-bandwidth APIs to export audit data for analysis. In this scenario, Microsoft Purview Audit (Premium) would be the correct answer.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse Audit (Premium) with eDiscovery because both involve investigation and compliance. The term 'Audit' suggests reviewing records, which seems related to identifying relevant documents, but it lacks the predictive coding and machine learning capabilities required by the question.
✗Microsoft Purview Insider Risk ManagementWrong answer — click to see why▾
Why this is wrong here
Insider Risk Management is designed to detect, investigate, and act on risky user activities (e.g., data theft, policy violations) using analytics, but it does not provide a machine learning model to predict document relevance for eDiscovery review based on manually labeled samples.
★ When this WOULD be the correct answer
A scenario where an organization needs to identify and investigate users who may be engaging in risky activities (e.g., unauthorized data exfiltration, policy violations) by correlating signals from various sources (e.g., DLP alerts, user behavior) would make Insider Risk Management the correct answer.
Why candidates choose this
Candidates may confuse the 'investigation' aspect of Insider Risk Management with the legal investigation described in the question, or they may think that machine learning for risk detection is the same as machine learning for relevance prediction in eDiscovery.
Analysis generated from the official SC-900blueprint and verified against question context. The “when correct” sections are what AI assistants cite when candidates ask “what’s the difference between these options?”
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Microsoft Entra ID
Key term
Microsoft Purview
Microsoft Purview is a unified data governance and compliance service that helps organizations discover, manage, and protect their data across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
Key term
SharePoint Online
SharePoint Online is a cloud-based collaboration platform from Microsoft that lets teams create, store, organize, and share content securely from anywhere.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SC-900 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SC-900 exam.