Data Governance With Azure Purview to Manage Multi-Cloud, On-Premise, and SaaS Data

Every organization is collecting more data than they used to even in the past month. Did you know that 90% of the data that we have today was formed in the previous two years only?

In fact, by the year 2025, we will have 80% unstructured data.

The influx of information and data that we are experiencing currently is expected to give rise to new challenges in businesses that are willing to leverage this data and sources.

If you are also going through similar data-related issues discussed below, then the data governance problem is already present in your organization. If we put it more specifically, you have a technology gap related to data governance in your business.

• Poor data visibility within the organization
• Low clarity on data ownership
• Poor data quality due to no metadata
• Confusion around definitions and terms
• Duplicate data

When any organization faces one or multiple of the above data issues, operational inefficiencies are created in the system. This creates confusion related to information and data that we are communicating externally as well as internally. What does that mean for a business?

It probably means that you are making poor decisions, as you are not able to understand data in your organization clearly.

Fortunately, Azure Purview is a solution launched by Microsoft for data governance. It assists you in understanding the data in your business, which is spread across various channels. You also gain the power to control data usage for data-based communication and collaboration.

This article will review the importance of Azure Purview in Data Governance and management of on-premise, multi-cloud, and SaaS data.

Azure Purview for Data Governance

Only last year, Azure Purview was introduced by Microsoft as a unified solution for data governance. This solution was launched with the vision of solving challenges that businesses face in disparate data asset management. With the help of this platform, your business can improve its understanding of data, which encourages efficient collaboration.

Azure Purview is a data governance solution to automate scanning, discovery, classification, business glossary, and data labelling. It is because of these automation customers get a comprehensive view of their crucial data assets. Azure Purview will collect data from third-party stores and all your Azure repositories. This includes your on-premise servers for SQL, cloud storage, or SaaS applications.

It is amazing that Azure Purview is designed on Apache Atlas, a landscape for data governance, so you get seamless deployment abilities. Additionally, it is also designed with in-built data compliance and security.

There are three major areas of discussion in Azure Purview:

• Purview Data Map
• Data Catalogue
• Data insights

With the help of Purview Data map, you can quickly scan data estate and check its lineage. This means you can evaluate the origin of your data and its entire transformation lifecycle. Customers can determine both column and asset-based lineages for data sources supported in Purview.

The Data Catalogue of Purview gives data sources to users who have permissions. It tells us that with the correct access permissions, you can understand the Where and What of your data, where it is, and what data we have.

Through data insights, it is possible to evaluate your assets, their glossary terms, and classification. Here, the glossary is the naming convention of the data used by businesses. For example, shipment address, SKU name, etc.

Unified Data Map for Hybrid Sources

Azure Purview Data Map is a foundation for effective data governance and usage. This means that you can manage and automate metadata that is coming into your organization from hybrid sources. There are so many in-built and custom sensitivity labels of Microsoft Information Protection and classifiers that can be used to classify the business’s data.

In addition, organizations have the power to define sensitive data labels for Azure, SQL Servers, Power BI, and Microsoft 365 consistently.

Finally, in an attempt to unify data governance, users are offered a choice to integrate every data system with the help of APIs of Apache Atlas.

Finding Reliable Data Easily

Purview Data Catalogue is designed to help you maximize the value of your business data for every customer of data in your organization. This is to say that you can find data with the help of business terms or technical jargon. You can understand your data with the help of associated business, technical, operational, and semantic metadata.  

Data consumers can even find data sensitivity levels through Purview. To add to this, you get interactive visualization of data lineage, which gives you a view of your data source or where it came from.

With the help of Purview Data Catalogue, engineers, scientists, and data analysts in your organization utilize AI, BI analytics, and machine learning for your business.

Insights Related to Sensitive Data of the Organization

Azure Purview helps you understand and discover sensitive data in the organization. You can use classifications or labels to access sensitive data’s location. This is accompanied by the feature of drilling down into details to analyze every data asset.

As already discussed, you can even use sensitivity labels of Microsoft Information Protection for your data assets in Azure Purview.

SQL Service Data Discovery

Azure Purview offers a unified service where you can govern and identify every SQL server. You just need to connect your Purview Data Map to the SQL server, which will allow automatic data classification and scanning.

Data Catalogue for Hierarchical Glossary

To better understand your data, you can make business terms with Purview Data Catalogue. You don’t need data dictionaries created in Excel. You can make an enterprise-grade glossary of business in Purview only. It is even possible to import data dictionaries that you already have with you. This makes your data more discoverable through the familiar language used in your business.

Conclusion

Right now, data is our most important business asset. Its value is colossal if you manage to discover and utilize data insights quickly. When you have more quality data, you have better insights related to your data.

However, more data means more challenges in analyzing and managing this data, which is the ultimate analysis paradox. Azure Purview is designed to help us overcome this paradox. It assists you in managing more data through robust data governance, which enables you to extract accurate and useful insights.