Acing Data Governance with Microsoft Purview

For modern organizations, data is a critical asset, and the unprecedented levels of digital transformation we witnessed during the early stages of the pandemic have only underlined its importance and increased its quantity.

With 89 percent of organizations now relying on a multi-cloud strategy and 80 percent taking a hybrid approach by combining the use of both public and private clouds, according to Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud Report, it can be a real challenge to keep all the different data sources and data types discoverable, organized, and secure without a lot of time-consuming manual work.

As if to further increase the difficulty of this challenge, organizations large and small have to comply with evolving regulatory requirements, many of which, such as CCPA and GDPR, impose steep non-compliance fines.

To ace data governance, organizations need a comprehensive solution capable of governing data across all clouds and platforms, and Microsoft Purview has emerged as an easy choice.

Introduction to Microsoft Purview

In the past, organizations had to navigate a highly fragmented data governance and compliance software landscape to govern, protect, and manage their data estates, which explains why 80 percent of organizations had purchased multiple products to meet their compliance and data protection needs, according to a survey of compliance and risk decision makers by MDC Research.

To provide a better solution and help its customers protect data and manage risks across their organizations, Microsoft decided to unify its Azure Purview, a set of data governance tools, with the Microsoft 365 Compliant portfolio, into a single product: Microsoft Purview.

“To meet the challenges of today’s decentralized, data-rich workplace, we’re introducing Microsoft Purview—a comprehensive set of solutions that help you govern, protect, and manage your entire data estate,” explains Alym Rayani, the General Manager, Microsoft Compliance Marketing at Microsoft.

Microsoft Purview helps organizations by:

• Automatically discovering data sitting across a variety of different data sources, from on-premises servers to SaaS applications.
• Turning the discovered data into a holistic map of the entire organization.
• Automatically classifying data based on gathered metadata without having to move the original data to a new location.
• Providing rich user experiences that improve collaboration between data producers, consumers, and stewards.
• Tracking and visualizing data lineage across the entire data estate to make it easy to see where data comes from and how it is transformed.

These and other capabilities are complemented by cloud security, endpoint management, identity management, access management, privacy management, and threat protection features to provide the most comprehensive approach to data governance.

Microsoft Purview in Practice

Microsoft made it simple for organizations to get started with Purview by including an ever-growing set of data connectors to scan, parse, and extract metadata from supported data sources, including Azure cloud storage, MySQL databases, and applications like Power BI and Salesforce, just to give a few examples.

Purview then uses the metadata to create the so-called Azure Purview data map, a unified map of all data assets the organization has and the relationships between them.

This map lives in Microsoft’s cloud, and it can scale up and down based on request load and metadata stored.

From there, Purview users can take advantage of Microsoft Purview Data Catalog to quickly find relevant data using an advanced search experience, Data Estate Insights to gain actionable insights into the data estate and its governance gaps, and Data Sharing to securely share data both within the organization and with outside business partners and customers.

Because Microsoft Purview is fully integrated with Azure Monitor, administrators can track its operational state to ensure that it’s working as intended and use the collected metrics to troubleshoot potential issues.

Getting Started With Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview is a cloud-based product that uses the pay-as-you-use pricing model to charge customers based on resource usage.

Organizations that implement and use Purview correctly can expect to discover, classify, and understand data from all sources in a cost-effective manner. In fact, they can often lower their costs by reducing the need for manual and custom data discovery and classification.

If you’re interested in tackling today’s data governance challenges using Microsoft Purview, contact us at OSIbeyond, and we will help you get started.