Through a cloud-based centralized user interface, a federated compliance system presents a policy of interest and representations of disparate systems that match the policy of interest to a user. The disparate systems, which operate in a distributed network computing environment, can include cloud-based repositories and off-cloud repositories. The federated compliance system can pull the cloud-based repositories through a cloud orchestrator and the off-cloud repositories through an off-cloud orchestrator over a secure tunnel. The federated compliance system utilizes user-provided information on the policy of interest to determine various categories of attributes from different repository schemas employed by the disparate systems. A federated retention policy mapper, implemented as a compliance service, maps the attributes to a common schema, creates a federated retention policy, and stores it in a federated space in the distributed network computing environment. A policy change can be automatically propagated across the disparate systems using the federated retention policy.