Microsoft Purview: Leading Data Governance Solution for Microsoft-Centric Organizations

While technology is the driving force that fuels business success, data serves as its vital core, ensuring that every process runs precisely. The advances in the technological landscape have made it so that acquiring data is no longer a challenge. The real difficulty lies in its sheer abundance, with much data remaining untapped or serving no real purpose. Tools that can sift through data, separating the meaningful from the useless, while preserving data integrity and security, are a must-have for effective business operations.

With the right information, organizations can make data-driven decisions like targeting specific demographics with marketing campaigns or optimizing organizational processes to enhance productivity. There are plenty of data governance solutions, but none are as effective and reliable as Microsoft Purview for Windows-reliant workspaces.

The Role of Governance in a Rapidly Evolving Data Landscape

The constant influx of vast amounts of data that requires classification, management, and secure storage has rendered manual attempts to do so increasingly futile. Data governance solutions are now an integral part of daily business operations. Microsoft software constitutes a significant section of widely used services employed by most businesses. Given this context, what data governance solution is better suited to address these challenges than Microsoft Purview?

Purview offers all the features, and more, that reliable data governance solutions must provide. These key components are

Data Classification: Categorizing data based on its sensitivity and relevance to business operations
Data Quality: Ensuring that the data is accurate and reliable
Data Accountability: Assigning responsibilities for handling and managing data to the concerned individuals
Data Security: Implementing checks and measures to prevent unauthorized data access and safeguard confidential corporate information
Compliance: Ensuring that the organization adheres to regulatory policies, both internal and external, to avoid legal and ethical issues

By ensuring these concepts are strictly followed, organizations can build a robust data governance framework that enables them to maximize the potential of the collected data while remaining compliant with data security regulations.

What Is Microsoft Purview?

Purview is a Microsoft-powered data governance platform designed to seamlessly integrate with other Microsoft products to provide a unified data management system. Purview is built on underlying Azure Purview and Microsoft 365 compliance service to create a centralized data management platform. Organizations can manage and secure their data through the Microsoft Purview portal. Purview offers a comprehensive list of solutions for discovering, categorizing, and governing data from multiple sources and teams within the organization.

Enables Data Governance

Purview supports data governance for services like Power BI, Azure storage services, Amazon S3, and many others. The tools that enable this are

Purview Data Catalog: Users can quickly search for the data they are trying to locate.
Purview Data Map: Provides a comprehensive view of how data is connected, where it resides, and its lineage.
Purview Data Policy: Regulates data sources based on access policies that take factors like job roles into account.
Purview Data Sharing: Shares data from Azure storage services without needing to move or duplicate it.
Purview Data Estate Insights: Highlights governance gaps and provides actionable insights regarding the organization’s data assets.

These services enable organizations to manage access to data securely, understand where data is stored and where it comes from, quickly locate data, and maintain data integrity by improving governance policies.

Enhances Data Security

Purview offers a robust set of tools that help organizations protect confidential business information. This is made possible by the following services

Purview Information Protection: Helps discover, classify, and protect sensitive information.
Purview Information Barriers: Define policies that prevent groups of users from communicating over services like Teams, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive.
Purview Data Loss Prevention: Define and enforce data loss prevention (DLP) policies over several services like Microsoft 365 suite, Office applications, Windows 10 and 11, etc.
Purview Insider Risk Management: Identifies malicious or accidental insider risks such as IP theft, data leakage, and security violations.
Purview Privileged Access Management: Replaces constant access to sensitive information with just-in-time access rules (access is granted only when required and for a short duration).

Minimizes Compliance Risks

The risk and compliance solutions built into Purview are designed to reduce noncompliance with internal and external regulations. The services that facilitate this aspect are

Purview Audit: Enables organizations to swiftly respond to security risks and facilitate investigations.
Purview Communication Compliance: Minimizes data leaks and office harassment incidents by quickly detecting and capturing relevant interactions over Teams, email, and Copilot.
Purview Compliance Manager: Simplifies the process of assessing and managing compliance.
Purview Data Lifecycle Management: Provides tools for retaining necessary data and deleting dated information.
Purview eDiscovery: Identifies and delivers interactions and information that can be used as legal evidence.

The extensive list of services bundled within Purview enables organizations to centrally and efficiently manage data and ensure compliance.

Why Microsoft Purview Stands Out?

Microsoft Purview’s standout feature is its ability to seamlessly integrate and function within the Microsoft ecosystem, which enhances its appeal for businesses that are already dependent on Microsoft products for their daily operations. The integration results in the creation of a unified data management and governance solution that simplifies and enhances related tasks. Here is how Purview interacts with various Microsoft tools:

Azure Integration: Purview integrates with several Azure cloud-hosted services like Azure SQL database and Azure Data Lake Storage. The former is used to store relational data while the latter offers scalable and secure storage for big data. By integrating Purview with these services organizations can categorize, catalog, and govern the data stored. Employees can easily, securely, and effectively locate and access the required data, even if they are stored across different services, thanks to Purview’s integration with Azure services.

Microsoft 365 Integration: Integrating Purview with Microsoft 365’s productivity and communication suite of tools enables organizations to extend governance and DLP policies to services like Teams and OneDrive. The policies ensure that data or documents cannot be leaked or stolen, while simultaneously preserving unobstructed collaboration between different teams.

Power BI Integration: Power BI is a suite of services designed to visualize data and connect seemingly unrelated sources of information. Integrating Purview and Power BI enhances data discovery and cataloging capabilities of organizations. Purview can improve the cataloging and classification of the data that Power BI uses for its reports and dashboards, ensuring that it remains accurate and compliant with governance policies.

Benefits of Using Purview in a Microsoft-Centric Business

We have already covered the extensive range of services Purview offers, and it is important to highlight that they are even more effective when integrated with Microsoft services. Purview leverages its integration with Microsoft applications to enhance data management, decision-making, and data security, making it an invaluable tool for organizations that are heavily reliant on Microsoft services.

Benefit	Description
Enhanced Data Management	Centralizes data management across cloud and on-premises systems. Integration with Azure and Microsoft 365 ensures efficient data discovery, classification, and lineage.
Improved Decision-Making	Provides organized, accurate data through a comprehensive catalog. Integration with Power BI facilitates effective data analysis and reporting.
Compliance and Security	Ensures data protection and regulatory compliance with robust classification, access controls, and audit logs.
Seamless Integration	Integrates smoothly with Microsoft services like Azure and Microsoft 365, enhancing data governance across various platforms.
Efficient Collaboration	Protects data while enabling smooth collaboration between teams, ensuring data security and operational efficiency.

Conclusion

In summary, Microsoft Purview offers a comprehensive suite of data management, security, and compliance management tools that are especially beneficial for businesses operating in a Microsoft ecosystem. Its integration with other Microsoft services enables it to protect data without impeding collaboration between employees. Contact us to learn more about Purview and what it can do for your organization.