Navigating the Era of Generative AI and Evolving Data Landscapes
The era of generative AI has ushered in unprecedented possibilities for businesses across industries. With the rapid advancements in AI-powered applications, organizations are now grappling with the convergence of several critical challenges – the speed and scale of cyberattacks, the proliferation of data sources and regulations, and the ever-increasing business demand for data-driven insights. To confidently embrace the AI-powered future, organizations must adopt a modern data governance and security strategy that can unify data protection and governance capabilities across their disparate, multi-cloud data estates.
Introducing Microsoft Purview: A Unified Approach to Data Governance
Microsoft Purview is a comprehensive suite of solutions designed to help organizations govern, protect, and manage their data, wherever it resides. This unified platform addresses the fragmentation of data across various sources, the lack of visibility that hampers effective data protection and governance, and the blurring of traditional IT management roles.
Empowering the Practice of Data Governance
The new Microsoft Purview data governance experience, available in preview from April 2024, offers a reimagined, business-friendly approach to data governance. Grounded in years of applied learning and proven practices from Microsoft’s own data governance journey, as well as the transformation journeys of enterprise customers, this solution is designed to enable organizations to accelerate the creation of responsible value from their data.
Aligning Data Governance with Business Objectives
At the core of the Microsoft Purview data governance experience is the principle of anchoring data governance investments to measurable business objectives and key results (OKRs). By aligning data governance practices with business priorities, organizations can demonstrate the tangible value of their data governance initiatives and ensure that their efforts are directly contributing to their strategic goals.
Unified Data Governance Experience
Microsoft Purview offers a single-pane-of-glass experience that integrates across multi-cloud data estate sources, enabling seamless data curation, management, health controls, discovery, and understanding. This unified approach reduces the need for multiple, custom-built solutions, allowing organizations to focus on accelerating their data governance practices, activating federated data governance across business units, and gaining real-time insights into the overall governance health of their data estate.
Simplifying Data Governance through AI and Natural Language Interactions
The ever-growing and changing data estate demands simplicity in how it is governed, ensuring business adoption and implementation efficiencies. Microsoft Purview leverages natural language interactions and machine learning-based recommendations across its governance capabilities to simplify the data governance experience and accelerate its adoption.
Enabling Federated Data Governance
Microsoft Purview is designed to support the practice of federated data governance, which is unique to each organization. Just as adopting cloud solutions requires an organization to become a “cloud company,” adopting data governance requires an organization to become a “data governance company.” This approach requires C-suite alignment and support, as well as a solution that is simple, efficient, customizable, and flexible to activate the organization’s unique data governance practice.
Unlocking the Power of Business-Friendly Data Governance
The new Microsoft Purview data governance experience is designed with the business in mind, supporting different functions across the organization with clear role definitions for governance administrators, business domain creators, data health owners, and data health readers.
Defining Business-Friendly Terminology
Within the Data Management module, customers can easily define and assign business-friendly terminology, such as “Finance” and “Claims,” which then follows through the entire data governance experience, including Data Products (a collection of data assets used for a business function), Business Domains (ownership of Data Products), Data Quality, Data Access, Actions, and Data Estate Health.
Comprehensive Data Quality Management
The new data quality model enables organizations to set rules top-down with business domains, data products, and the data assets themselves. Policies can be applied at the term or rule level, automating data stewardship tasks and saving time and effort depending on the scale of the data estate.
The data quality model generates data quality scores at the asset, data product, or business domain level, providing organizations with snapshot insights into the quality of their data relative to their defined business rules. This model leverages two metadata analysis capabilities: data profiling (quick sample set insights) and data quality scans (in-depth scans of full data sets) to provide data quality insights and recommendations.
Aligning with Industry Standards
In partnership with the EDM Council, Microsoft Purview introduces a set of 14 standards for cloud data management controls, governing how data is to be managed and ensuring the fidelity of how data assets are used and accessed. Examples include metadata completeness, cataloging, classification, access entitlement, and data quality. Organizations can configure these rules and define what constitutes a red/yellow/green indicator score, aligning with their unique standards and requirements.
Putting the “Practice” into Data Governance
Data governance is a practice that is nurtured over time, and Microsoft Purview provides a range of features to help organizations put the “practice” into their data governance efforts.
Aggregated Insights and Reporting
The Microsoft Purview data governance experience offers built-in reports that surface deep insights across a variety of dimensions, including assets, catalog adoption, classifications, data governance, data stewardship, glossary, and sensitivity labels. These reports can be filtered by business domain, data product, and status, enabling organizations to gain a comprehensive understanding of the health of their governed data estate.
Actionable Insights and Workflow Optimization
The Actions center within Microsoft Purview aggregates and summarizes governance-related actions by role, data product, or business domain. These actions stem from usage or implementation being out of alignment with defined controls, and the interactive summary makes it easy for teams to manage and track these actions, enabling them to improve the overall posture of the data governance practice.
Extending the Value of Microsoft Purview
Microsoft Purview is designed to integrate and extend across an organization’s technology estate, further enhancing the value it provides.
Strategic Partnerships and Industry-Specific Solutions
Microsoft has announced a solution initiative with Ernst & Young LLP (EY US), who will leverage their extensive experience in data solutions within the financial services industry to collaborate on producing data governance reports and playbooks purpose-built for US-oriented financial services customers. These assets will be made available in the Azure Marketplace, helping to accelerate the customer’s time to value for activating a governance practice that adheres to the unique regulatory needs of the financial sector.
Seamless Integration with the Technology Ecosystem
The new Microsoft Purview data governance experience also features technology partnerships that will help seamlessly extend the value of the platform to customers through pre-built integrations. These integrations will be made available in the Azure Marketplace, enabling organizations to amplify the benefits of Microsoft Purview within their existing technology ecosystem.
Embracing the Future of Data Governance
The introduction of the reimagined Microsoft Purview data governance experience marks a significant milestone in the journey towards comprehensive data governance. By aligning data governance with business objectives, simplifying the user experience through AI-powered recommendations, and enabling federated data governance, Microsoft Purview empowers organizations to confidently navigate the era of generative AI and evolving data landscapes.
As organizations strive to unlock the full potential of their data, the IT Fix blog encourages IT professionals to explore the capabilities of Microsoft Purview and leverage its robust data governance solutions to drive their digital transformation and secure their data-driven future.
