Microsoft Azure Purview: New Data Governance Service

As organizations accumulate, store, and analyze increasingly large volumes of data, the tools needed to locate, document, monitor, and control data sharing are becoming ever more crucial. Microsoft is now introducing Azure Purview, a new data governance service currently in public preview, designed to consolidate all these functions into a unified data catalog offering discovery and data governance features.

Rohan Kumar, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure Data, explained that this represents a significant challenge for many enterprises. While companies are eager to leverage data-intensive technologies like predictive analytics, their data and privacy leaders are deeply concerned with ensuring data usage adheres to compliance standards or that appropriate permissions are obtained for utilizing customer data.

Furthermore, businesses need assurance regarding data reliability and a clear understanding of who has access and who has modified it.

“[Purview] is a comprehensive data governance platform that automates data discovery, data cataloging, data mapping, and lineage tracking—with the goal of providing our customers with a thorough understanding of their entire data landscape. It also ensures that compliance regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, are effectively managed across the entire data estate, helping to avoid regulatory breaches,” Kumar stated.

The foundation of Purview is its catalog, which can ingest data from common sources like Azure’s various data and storage offerings, as well as external data stores, including Amazon’s S3 service and on-premises SQL Server. The company plans to expand support for additional data sources over time.

Kumar characterized this development as a “long-term investment,” indicating that today’s release represents only a portion of the planned features. The initial focus of this release is on mapping an organization’s complete data environment.

Image Credits: Microsoft

“The next step [in development] involves more sophisticated governance policies,” Kumar said. “Consider the ability to define rules such as restricting access to personally identifiable information (PII) across all data stores to a specific user group. Currently, implementing such a rule is highly complex and prone to errors. Purview will simplify this process to setting a policy within the platform.”

Alongside the launch of Purview, the Azure team has also made Azure Synapse, Microsoft’s next-generation data warehousing and analytics service, generally available. Synapse aims to provide enterprises—and their engineers and data scientists—with a single platform integrating data integration, warehousing, and big data analytics.

“Synapse offers a completely code-free experience for data engineers, for example, to construct these [data] pipelines and collaborate seamlessly with data scientists developing machine learning models, or business analysts creating reports for tools like Power BI.”

Key customers currently utilizing the service, which Kumar described as one of the fastest-growing Azure offerings, include FedEx, Walgreens, Myntra, and P&G.

“The insights we derive from continuous analysis help us optimize our network,” said Sriram Krishnasamy, senior vice president, strategic programs at FedEx Services. “As FedEx transports critical, high-value shipments globally, we can often anticipate potential disruptions caused by weather or traffic and proactively address them by rerouting deliveries from alternative locations.”

Image Credits: Microsoft