Microsoft Purview – the future of unified data governance solution

Data Governance is often overlooked when it comes to architecting your data estate. Microsoft Purview is the new unified data governance solution that can help manage your data whether it is on on-premises, multi-cloud, or entirely on Azure. Microsoft Purview is a combination of what was formerly known as Azure Purview and Microsoft 365’s compliance solutions.

Microsoft Purview can help give us a bird’s-eye view into our data estate and how we talk about data across our organizations. Since data governance has become pivotal as the value of data assets have increased, data governance is necessary to assure that the data is usable, safe, secure, private and compliant with both internal and external data policies. In addition, Microsoft Purview keeps up-to-date information about data and processes.

Core features:

1. Governance portal –

When a new Purview portal is provisioned, you get access to the governance portal. The governance portal allows you to:

Create a holistic, up-to-date map of your data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, and end-to-end data lineage.
Enable data curators to manage and secure your data estate.
Empower data consumers to find valuable, trustworthy data.

2. Data Map – scans and classifications

A data map is a space where you define your data estate and register your data sources. You organize your data into collections and classify your data. Data map forms the foundation for data discovery and data governance. It captures metadata about data present in analytics, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and operating systems in hybrid, on-premises, and multi-cloud environments. The Microsoft Purview data map stays up-to-date with its built-in scanning and classification system.

3. Data Catalog – Data Lineage and Business Glossary

Once Purview is aware of the data in your data estate, you can use the catalog to browse it and also to view your data lineage.

Data lineage is the visual representation of data assets origin and how and where it moves across the data estate. This is great for troubleshooting and forward-looking scenarios or impact analysis. Purview also supports defining the data lineage through API if necessary.
Business Glossary provides a consistent vocabulary for business users. It typically consists of business terms and how they relate to each other as well as the assets in the catalog. Business Glossary helps in abstracting the technical jargon associated with the data repositories and allows the business user to discover and work with data in the vocabulary that is more familiar to them.

4. Search

The goal of Search in Purview is quickly find the data that matters. Search helps you to discover the data based on relevance using signals derived from scanning, classification, and business context.
Benefits:

Empower business and technical data analysts via a catalog to find and interpret data.
Provide intelligent recommendations based on data relationships, business context, and search history.
Power data scientists and engineers with business context to drive BI, Analytics, AI and ML initiatives.

5. Data Estate Insights

Insights are intended to help users such as Chief Data Officers quickly understand their data estate at large and gain key insights such as the places where sensitive data resides. All the reports within the Data Estate Insights application are automatically generated and populated, so governance stakeholders can focus on the information rather than building the reports.

Asset Insights to see where all data resides across a range of data sources. Scan Insights to track successful, failed, and cancelled scans over a period. Glossary insights to understand changes made to business terms and how much coverage glossary has over your data map

Sensitive data Insights to simplify compliance risk assessment across operational and transactional data sources. Assess risk and derive audit trails of data qualified by sensitivity and business relevance.

The dashboards and reports available within Microsoft Purview Data Estate Insights are categorized in three sections:

Health
Inventory and Ownership
Curation and governance