Taming the Data Jungle: How Microsoft Purview Automates Data Governance 

Overview 

In the real world, data is rarely tidy. It’s fragmented across legacy on-premises systems, modern cloud platforms, and countless SaaS applications, creating a chaotic, tangled “data jungle”. Managing Data Governance manually is not only time consuming but inherently difficult due to vast array of data types, data locations and use cases. 

This is where Microsoft Purview implementation steps in. Microsoft Purview aims to simplify and automate the different elements of a Data Governance Framework, helping you gain control over your entire data estate. 

What is a Data Governance Framework? 

A Data Governance Framework is the coming together of people, processes and data. It establishes what data exists in an organisation, the data owners, curators, stewards and consumers. It determines how data is used across an organisation, establishing data quality to ensure accuracy, completeness, and reliability. It also defines data retention periods and sets policies and rules for data-related compliance.

Discovery 

The first step in any Data Governance framework is to identify all of the data in an organisation. Where it lives, what format it is in and how the lineage (connections to other data elements) is constructed.  

Purview Data Governance (a core part of Data Governance consulting services) has the ability to ingest metadata from large group of data source types, from your on-premise SQL server, Microsoft Fabric Workspaces, CRM/ERP SaaS solutions, even ChatGPT Enterprise AI interactions. This allows a centralised repository of metadata, easily identifiable and ready to classify.

Classification 

Data is just 1s and 0s without context. For data to have real value, it must be classified. These could be classifications such as person identifiable data, business units, use cases or any other kind of grouping of relevant data. 

Purview Data Governance, supported by Purview data classification services, has a number of built in classifications which can be automatically applied. Additionally, custom classifications can be used to cover all bases that exist in a Data Governance Framework. 

Policies and Rules

Data should be regulated and protected. An organisation should identify what kind of data is within their ecosystem, how long it should be kept for, what it can be used for and who can access the data. Furthermore, there must be rules or processes in place to ensure policies are adhered to. 

With the combination of Purview Data Governance and Purview Data Security, a number of automated policies and processes can be put in place. From data loss prevention, retention policies and encryption requirements, Microsoft Purview automates tasks to ensure your data jungle is compliant and controlled. The vast array of automated tools at your disposal is staggering, the list of potentials is too great to fully list here but at Simpson Associates we can help you to identify the toolsets of use to your organisation. Expert Data Governance consulting can assist in taming your data jungle and reduce existing Data Governance overheads. 

Data Quality 

What do we mean by data quality and how is it assessed? Data quality is ensuring data is complete (no missing fields/incomplete records), valid (a name is not entered into a date field) and reliable (200 records all with John Doe as the First and Last Name is unlikely to be reliable data for reporting!). 

Microsoft Purview’s Data Governance capabilities come with a set of built in data quality tools to assess, report and put alerts on your data quality. A number of data quality rules can be setup to automate your assessments. You can see progression over time of how the quality has increased or decreased through the reporting features and setup alerts for unexpected behaviour or important events. You are now automating your data quality assessment, report generation, and alerts. On top of that, Purview provides data quality actions to help identify and address issues in your data estate.

Bridging Data Owners with Data Consumers 

Purview’s Unified Data Catalogue allows an organisation to create a centralised space for data owners to provide context on the data they curate, creating data products and associating data with internal terminology using Glossary terms. This allows data consumers such as report writers or analysts to identify what data exists in the organisation, how it links to other data sets within a data product. 

In addition to these functions, Purview offers a request process, allowing data consumers to request access to a data asset. Before requesting access, they can see any restrictions or requirements set out by the data owner. This saves time both in the discovery of data and automating some of the decision-making process for data access requests. Minimising administrative overhead and allowing organisations to effectively manage their data jungle. 

Conclusion 

Microsoft Purview’s Data Governance provides an end to end solution for managing a data estate, regardless of where data is or it’s current format. It allows an organisation to automate their Data Governance framework and provides a central repository for Data Governance, to be used by data owners and data curators alike. This means there are no longer any hidden silos of data, data without context or an overwhelming administrative overhead for managing a data estate. 

How Simpson Associates can help you?

If you’re looking to get started with Microsoft Purview but aren’t sure where to begin, Simpson Associates can help. As a Microsoft Solutions Partner and a Microsoft Partner of the Year award winner, we are ideally positioned to support your organisation in implementing Microsoft Purview effectively.

Our Simpson Associates Purview Accelerator offers a fully managed platform to help you establish unified Data Governance from the outset. This solution enables you to scan and classify data across on-premises and multi-cloud environments, ensuring your data consumers have access to accurate, trusted information.

Whether you’re looking to unlock more value from your data or evaluate Microsoft Purview, our Data Governance consulting services can provide the guidance and technical expertise needed to move forward with confidence. Get in touch with us now via email or our live chat.

Blog Author:

Peter West, Azure Cloud Engineer at Simpson Associates.