Soleno Therapeutics strengthens security and information governance with Microsoft Defender and Purview Suite for Business Premium

Challenges

Soleno Therapeutics, a rare-disease biotech, was operating in a decentralized environment as it scaled. With sensitive clinical, regulatory, financial, and commercial data dispersed across systems, Soleno needed a trusted, unified security platform.

Working with Microsoft partner Netwoven, Soleno deployed Microsoft Defender and Purview Suite for Business Premium, improving visibility, governance, and consistency.

With a more secure, organized, and unified environment, Soleno’s IT team shifted from managing daily access and security risks to driving strategic initiatives.

Protecting a critical mission to serve patients that others overlook

Scaling businesses like Soleno Therapeutics are foundational to the world we live in. They drive breakthroughs, serve communities, and take on challenges that larger organizations often overlook. Microsoft Defender and Purview Suite for Business Premium exists precisely for companies like Soleno: companies doing meaningful work that require strong, scalable security to grow responsibly.

Soleno Therapeutics focuses on rare diseases affecting small, scattered patient populations with few or no treatment options. Behind every breakthrough are years of irreplaceable clinical trial data, regulatory submissions, intellectual property and commercial programs. Because their work involves real patients and highly sensitive data, security isn’t just an IT priority for Soleno, it’s a business imperative.

Nonetheless, Soleno faced significant challenges in its data environment. Its security architecture was a patchwork of disconnected tools with no unified view of how permissions and access were granted. As cyber threats continue to evolve across the industry, Soleno recognized the importance of enhancing its ability to detect, prevent, and respond to security risks in a timely and consistent manner.

Solution

Building the right foundation with Microsoft

For Soleno, the right solution wasn’t just about security. It was about finding a platform built to scale with Soleno’s growth. After selecting Microsoft Partner Netwoven, Soleno deployed Microsoft Defender and Purview Suite for Business Premium. In doing so, Soleno gained the unified, powerful protection the company needed while ensuring the company remained focused on patient research and outreach.

The Defender Suite capabilities were deployed as an integrated control layer across Microsoft 365. For Soleno, it would protect users, endpoints, email, and collaboration data, including AI usage through Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Working in tandem with the Purview Suite capabilities, Soleno was given a continuously monitored security platform designed to support the needs of a regulated biotech environment and to align with Soleno’s internal control and compliance objectives, including considerations relevant to Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Identified opportunities were addressed, and sustainable guardrails were established across the organization.

The Purview Suite capabilities gave Soleno a way to classify and control its data in a way that made sense for its highly regulated industry.

The team defined a tiered labeling system, from “Public” to “High Risk.” This ensured every document carried the right level of protection no matter where it traveled or who it reached.

As Soleno operates across the US and Europe, with different regional requirements and compliance obligations, this type of built-in flexibility was essential.

For example, when preparing submission documents to the European Medicines Agency (EMA), Soleno discovered that EMA regulators do not permit watermarks on official filings.

Rather than painstakingly removing watermarks from one document at a time, Soleno used the Purview Suite’s flexible labeling capability to create a dedicated label for regulatory submissions with no watermarks. It’s exactly the kind of adaptability that makes the difference for a company navigating complex, multi-region compliance requirements.

Global expansion while staying compliant across borders

When Soleno opened an office in Dublin, Ireland, its European team had been set up as a subfolder inside the U.S. SharePoint environment. As a result, European employee data was sitting in a U.S.-rooted system with no EU data residency in place. This structure required adjustment to better align with EU data residency expectations.

The deployment also solved a compliance challenge that many growing businesses don't see coming until it's already a problem.

Using Microsoft's Multi-Geo capabilities, Soleno created a properly separated environment for its Dublin team with EU data residency built in, ensuring employees returned during a holiday period to an enhanced and secure EU environment, aligned with EU data residency requirements, without any disruption. This gave Soleno enterprise grade security and information governance typically seen in much larger organizations, without adding operational complexity.

For Soleno, this development went beyond solving a compliance problem. It made international growth possible without adding infrastructure complexity, additional vendors or separate regional solutions. It’s a direct example of how the right platform scales with a business. Not against it.

Advanced security with nimble execution

Prior to the deployment, Soleno’s two-person internal IT team spent most of its time in reactive mode, whether fielding daily access tickets, troubleshooting permissions or piecing together a security picture from disparate tools.

When Microsoft Defender and Purview Suite for Business Premium consolidated into a single platform, that outlook immediately changed. The team could now view identity, endpoint, data and collaboration risks all in one place - precisely the threat visibility it had been missing.

Policies could be enforced consistently across the organization, and the team could stop chasing problems after the fact.

Turning security into a springboard

For Soleno, the impact was felt right away. With Microsoft Defender and Purview Suite for Business Premium fully in place, Soleno’s environment was organized, well governed, more consistent, and better aligned with compliance objectives.

The IT team now had the visibility, control, and confidence to focus on what actually mattered. Data was classified, governed and protected, giving Soleno a solid base to build on.

Impact

With the satisfaction of deploying Microsoft Defender and Purview Suite for Business Premium, the team at Soleno is expanding its use of Microsoft Viva. They're also evaluating Microsoft Sentinel to bring centralized security information and event management (SIEM) capabilities to the environment, extending threat visibility beyond Microsoft applications to the company's full technology stack.
Soleno’s commitment to security doesn’t stop here. With Microsoft Defender and Purview Suite for Business Premium at its core, the company is firmly on the path of secure, governed growth that’s built to last.