BITSUMMIT modernized data security for the City of Kawartha Lakes with Microsoft Purview, baselining four governance domains and rolling out controls pilot-first with no disruption.
The City of Kawartha Lakes was carrying the security debt that builds up quietly in a maturing Microsoft 365 estate: policies that had grown fragmented over time, limited visibility into how sensitive information moved, and compliance demands that kept rising. Together those created blind spots across the collaboration tools the city runs on.
What the city needed was a structured uplift of its Microsoft 365 security and compliance posture, enough to take control of sensitive data, reduce risk, and modernize identity protections, across 1,200 users on Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. The catch was that it had to be done with rigor but without disrupting how people work day to day, which meant a coordinated assessment and a carefully staged rollout rather than a blanket switch-on.
BITSUMMIT delivered a full Microsoft Purview deployment on an assessment-to-execution model, built around clarity, control, and safe enablement, with each phase run with the discipline to produce measurable outcomes and real operational readiness.
Discovery and assessment
The engagement opened with kickoff sessions to align stakeholders, timelines, and access, then assessed four domains: identity security (MFA, Conditional Access, and sharing), data loss prevention, information protection, and compliance configuration. The team reviewed collaboration patterns and regulatory drivers and documented the personas and risk categories that the policies would need to fit.
Policy design and staging
Those findings became a focused design. BITSUMMIT developed Conditional Access and authentication-method policies and sharing constraints, and designed DLP and Sensitivity Label policies mapped to the data that actually mattered to the city: financial, PII, health, and custom categories.
Validation and low-risk rollout
Nothing went straight to production. Simulation and pilot groups validated the policies first, Help Desk activity was monitored to catch user impact early, and feedback was folded back in through remediation and re-testing before wider deployment.
Operational readiness and change enablement
BITSUMMIT produced as-configured documentation for Entra ID, Purview, and SharePoint, ran knowledge-transfer and Help Desk readiness sessions covering MFA, Conditional Access, labeling, and DLP, and supported the user communication and executive briefing that turn a security rollout into something people actually adopt.
The city came away with a consolidated, governed Microsoft 365 environment built for sustained compliance and user trust, with policies that were validated, communicated, and adopted rather than imposed. Identity, DLP, information protection, and compliance baselines are established and recorded across all four domains, the prioritized Purview controls were implemented pilot-first to keep disruption to a minimum, and the documentation and final presentation were singled out for their clarity. Help Desk readiness, support playbooks, and end-user narratives were all in place, and the engagement landed on schedule, running from November into early January as planned.
With the Purview foundations set, Kawartha Lakes is positioned to extend DLP coverage to endpoints and more applications, tighten external-collaboration guardrails, and automate labeling for key data domains. Quarterly reviews of policy effectiveness and compliance alignment are now part of the roadmap, giving the city a governance model that keeps evolving with its needs rather than ageing back into the same blind spots.
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