SC-900 Practice Question: Describe the capabilities of Microsoft compliance solutions
An organization has a Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management policy that retains all documents for 5 years. However, legal requires that documents related to a specific lawsuit be preserved indefinitely. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse retention labels (which require manual or automatic application to individual items) with litigation hold (which applies to an entire site or OneDrive account), leading them to choose option C despite its impracticality for bulk preservation.
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
✓
Place the relevant sites on litigation hold
Litigation hold (now called legal hold in Microsoft Purview) preserves all content in a SharePoint site or OneDrive account indefinitely, overriding any retention policy. This ensures documents related to the lawsuit are not deleted or altered, even if a Data Lifecycle Management policy would otherwise remove them after 5 years. The hold applies at the site level, not to individual items, and prevents both deletion and modification.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Configure information barriers
Why it's wrong here
Configuring information barriers in Microsoft Purview is designed to prevent specific groups of users from communicating with each other or sharing data, typically to avoid conflicts of interest or comply with regulatory requirements in regulated industries. These barriers establish communication boundaries within an organization but do not provide any mechanism for preserving content indefinitely or preventing its deletion for legal discovery purposes. Their function is strictly about controlling communication flow, not data retention.
- ✓
Place the relevant sites on litigation hold
Why this is correct
Placing relevant sites on litigation hold, also known as an eDiscovery hold, is the precise and legally recognized mechanism within Microsoft Purview to preserve electronically stored information (ESI) indefinitely for legal or investigative purposes. This action overrides all existing retention policies and user deletion actions, ensuring that all content, including documents, emails, and versions, remains immutable and discoverable for the entire duration of the legal matter, regardless of any other retention settings.
- ✗
Apply a retention label with indefinite retention
Why it's wrong here
Applying a retention label with indefinite retention is tempting as it directly addresses the "indefinitely" requirement and is used for classifying content for standard business or regulatory retention. However, while retention labels *set* a retention period, they are not the primary mechanism for overriding an existing organisational retention policy for specific items due to a legal requirement. For a specific lawsuit, a legal hold or eDiscovery hold is the precise mechanism, as it suspends deletion actions and ensures preservation regardless of existing retention policies or labels.
- ✗
Create a DLP policy to block deletion
Why it's wrong here
Creating a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy is intended to identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive information from being inappropriately shared, accessed, or exfiltrated outside the organization. While DLP can block certain actions like sharing or moving files, its primary function is preventing data leakage, not ensuring the indefinite preservation of content against deletion for legal discovery. DLP policies do not possess the robust, overriding preservation capabilities required to guarantee content immutability for legal holds.
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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
Organization
An Organization is a top-level container in Google Cloud that represents your company or entities and serves as the root node for all your cloud resources, policies, and access control.
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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.