Data Governance just got better

Here’s why

A few days ago, Microsoft unveiled Azure Purview, a unified data governance service as part of its Azure cloud platform, that can discover and catalog all of an organization’s data across all environments and locations while minimizing compliance risk. It helps customers map all their data, no matter where it resides, to provide an end-to-end view of their data estate.

What and why data governance

Wikipedia defines data governance as the capability that enables an organization to ensure that high data quality exists throughout the lifecycle of the data, and data controls are implemented to support business objectives.

Data is the most important asset that organizations have. Data governance helps to ensure that data is usable, accessible, and protected. Effective data governance leads to better data analytics, which in turn leads to better decision making and improved operations support. Further, it helps to avoid data inconsistencies or errors, which lead to integrity issues, poor decision making, and a variety of organizational problems.

Data governance ensures that organizations are consistently compliant with all levels of regulatory requirements. This is key for minimizing risks and reducing operational costs. Data governance leads to improved data quality, decreased data management costs, and increased access to data for all stakeholders. The result — better decision making and better business outcomes.

What Azure Purview offers

• Purview can scan all your data sources. While scanning, built-in and custom classifiers can identify the type of data existing in your sources and provide the right classification to it, making it easy to quickly find specific types of data, including sensitive data.
• Purview allows users to easily search and find data assets, using familiar key terms. These terms could be technical, meta-data or aligned to business and it’s processes.

Purview, offers an overview of all sources via a Data Map to both business and technical stakeholders. These can be organized and structured in separate collections depending on the type of organization.

With increasing amount of data and data sources, the chance of finding relevant data is bleak. Purview makes this easy with its keyword search.

On probing further, information such as created time, modified time, datatypes, glossary, labels etc. are revealed.

Purview also provides a lineage view that describes the source system, the tables from where the data originates.

With the Insights view in Azure Purview, a holistic view of all the data in the data map is available.

In the glossary view, the most frequently occurring terms are displayed.

The classifications are visualized to display all the classified and sensitive data across the organization.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27bA4KFiEKk(screenshot)

Behind the scenes

Azure Purview consists of:

• Data discovery, classification, and mapping that will automatically find the organization’s data on-premises or in the cloud and evaluate its characteristics and sensitivity.
• Data catalog that enables users to search for trusted data using a simple web-based experience — the visual graphs let users quickly see if data of interest is from a trusted source.
• Data governance that provides users a bird’s-eye view of a company’s data landscape, enabling data officers to efficiently govern data use. This view enables critical insights such as data distribution across environments, how data is moving, and where sensitive data is stored.

The data map is exposed as an Apache Atlas open API, where customers can programmatically push any metadata in lineage from any data system to expand it.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27bA4KFiEKk(screenshot)

Without further ado, let’s get started and sign up for Azure Purview at https://aka.ms/TryAzurePurview

And to learn more, check out the online resources at https://aka.ms/AzurePurview