Insider Risk Management Coverage Review

TL;DR: This skill inspects your Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management policies, indicators and triggers, then produces a prioritised coverage and tuning report so risky activity such as data theft or leaks does not go undetected.

What is Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management coverage?

Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management uses policies, signals and machine learning to detect, investigate and act on potentially risky activity by users across Microsoft 365, including data theft by departing users, data leaks and security policy violations. Coverage describes which insider risk scenarios are watched, which indicators and triggering events are enabled, and how those signals connect to sources such as Microsoft Entra, DLP, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft 365 audit logs. This skill reviews that coverage so blind spots and noisy indicators are made visible before they become incidents.

When should you run this skill?

• “Show me which Insider Risk Management policies are actually configured and active.”
• “Are we covering departing-user data theft and accidental data leaks?”
• “Which insider risk indicators are switched off and leaving us exposed?”
• “Review our Purview insider risk coverage before the next audit.”
• “Why are our insider risk alerts so noisy and how do we tune them?”
• “Map our insider risk policies to Essential Eight and ISM expectations.”
• “Has anyone reviewed Insider Risk Management since we onboarded new connectors?”

How this skill works, step by step

1. Connect read-only to Microsoft Purview and enumerate every Insider Risk Management policy, its template, scope and status.
2. Inspect the indicators and triggering events enabled for each policy, noting which indicator categories are disabled.
3. Review connected signal sources, including Microsoft Entra leavers, DLP policies, Microsoft Defender alerts and HR connectors, to confirm triggers can fire.
4. Check policy scoping against user and group membership to find users or departments with no insider risk coverage.
5. Assess alert volume, severity thresholds and the indicator weighting that drives each policy.
6. Compare the configured estate against the standard insider risk scenarios such as data theft, data leaks and security violations to identify missing scenarios.
7. Derive a risk score for each finding by weighting scenario severity, the share of in-scope users covered and whether triggering signals are connected.
8. Rank findings from highest to lowest residual risk and attach a concise remediation recommendation to each.

Output format

The skill returns a structured coverage report. The table below lists each finding with its area, observation, derived risk and recommended action.

A short summary accompanies the table:

• Total policies reviewed and how many are active versus disabled.
• Count of standard insider risk scenarios covered against the full set.
• Percentage of in-scope users with at least one active policy.
• The three highest residual-risk findings to prioritise first.

Scope and safety

This skill is read-only by default and makes no changes to your tenant, policies, indicators or user scoping. It only reads configuration and reports on it.

This skill does NOT:

• Create, edit, enable or disable any Insider Risk Management policy or indicator.
• Open, resolve or alter insider risk cases, alerts or investigations.
• Read the content of user files, messages or the detailed activity of named individuals.
• Change scoping, role assignments, connectors or signal sources.

Licensing and permissions

Licences and add-ons

Least-privilege roles

• Insider Risk Management Readers, or Insider Risk Management Analysts, for read-only review of policies and indicators.
• Global Reader or Compliance Data Administrator for broad read access to compliance configuration.

Microsoft Graph permissions (read-only)

• Insider Risk Management is administered through the Microsoft Purview portal and the Security and Compliance PowerShell module rather than Microsoft Graph, so this skill reads configuration via those interfaces and does not require app-level Graph scopes.
• Where audit context is also reviewed, AuditLog.Read.All may apply to read Microsoft 365 unified audit log entries.

Related skills

• Data Classification and SIT Coverage: run before this to see where sensitive information types match content.
• Tenant DLP Coverage and Effectiveness Audit: run alongside this to check Data Loss Prevention policy coverage.
• Communication Compliance Coverage: run alongside this to check which users and channels are monitored.
• eDiscovery and Legal Hold Readiness: run after this when an investigation needs preserved evidence.
• Governing Microsoft 365 Copilot with Microsoft Purview: pillar guide to the Purview controls for Microsoft 365 Copilot, including insider risk.

Sources and compliance

• Insider risk management 
• Insider risk management policies 
• Aligns with ISM event logging and monitoring controls by validating that insider risk signals are collected and acted upon.

Licensed under CC BY 4.0  by EDUC4TE .

Last reviewed 2026-06-02