Five Interesting Benefits of Using Microsoft Purview For Data Governance
“Artificial Intelligence is nothing without data, while data is nothing without data management and governance”.- Dr. Jania Okwechime
Overview
Do you work with data, either as a Data Scientist, Data Analyst, or Data Engineer(of course, who doesn’t?), or do you understand how vital information can be for organizations (public and private), especially when the information is readily available and accessible? Recently, there is a global influx of “Big Data” in most organizations and businesses, and data is the new driving force. It influences everything from connecting with customers and experiences to marketing strategies, as well as modern product development. In other words, data is crucial for global structure, advancement, and opportunity.
However, what occurs when that data isn’t readily accessible or distributed across sectors, and how can enterprises and organizations overcome this hurdle to better position themselves for growth and development? Imagine spending an ample amount of time aiming to acquire a piece of data, while also striving with time-consuming customer service communications because the important information isn’t easily and readily accessible.
In this blog, we will discuss the five(5) major benefits of data governance and management with new data estate using Microsoft Purview.
What is Microsoft Purview?
Microsoft Purview is a universal data governance and management-solving tool that aids the security, governance, and management of a complete data estate on-premise, multi-cloud, or Software as a Service (SaaS). It aggregates together previous Azure Purview and Microsoft 365 Compliance portfolios under a single entity in a unified environment.
Microsoft Purview aids the understanding and governing of your data, protect data where it resides, and enhances it in a much better way than the native services that posed negative effects on today’s market. Furthermore, with Microsoft Purview an integrated, updated map of the data landscape with full automation of data insights and an end-to-end data pipeline is easily produced.
Now that you know what Microsoft Purview is, let’s dive into the five(5) benefits of using Microsoft Purview for data governance within your company or organization.
Benefits of using Microsoft Purview as a data governance tool
- Management of the growing data landscape
- Overcoming Operational Silos
- Increase in data agility
- Compliance with industry regulations
- Gaining insights into data use across the estate
1.) Management of the growing data landscape
What is a data landscape?
A data landscape is the depiction of the totality of data assets, storage mechanisms, as well as numerous methods used to create, analyze, and process data present in an organization’s data ecosystem. As a business organization or Tech start-up that uses big data for analysis, modeling, Prediction, etc. Understanding the data landscape of your organization is highly imperative. The data administrators and engineers working within the organization require the necessary skills, methods, and expertise to manage the data landscape of your organization. Data increases on daily basis;- and the lack of proper management of these growing datasets will adversely affect the insights derived by the data scientists and analysts in the long run.
However, a fully data-driven organization requires more than just great technology and quality data. Hence, the use of the Microsoft Purview automation process for data discovery, achieved through the provision of data scanning and classification as a service for data assets across your data environment should be employed for effective data governance, within your organization. Likewise, Microsoft Purviews also aids the discovery of Metadata and descriptions of data assets which are then integrated into a comprehensive map of your data environment.
There are numerous purpose-built apps within Microsoft Purview that enables environments for data discovery, access management, and insights discovery about the data landscape within your organization. These are:
• Data Map
This feature supply the starting point of data location and efficient data governance. It is a cloud native PaaS service that collect metadata about business data available in analytics and operation systems on-premises and cloud. It is automatically kept relevant with built-in automated scanning and classification system. This permits Enterprise users to configure and use it through an intuitive UI while developers can programmatically communicate via open-source Apache Atlas 2.2 APIs. It controls the Data Catalog and Data Estate Insights as centralized experiences within the Microsoft Purview governance portal.
According to Microsoft, this feature provides “a bird’s-eye view of a company’s data landscape,”. It aids discovery, classification and mapping of the organization’s data across all spheres. It can also mechanically map sensitive data of the organization across locations thereby improving flexibility with external merchants.
- Data Catalog
With this feature your Enterprise and technical users can rapidly and easily discover compatible data through a search incident with filters. This feature ensures easy discovery and understanding of data sources by the users. For Domain experts, data benders and enthusiasts, it further enables data curation techniques such as data tagging and Enterprise glossary management. Likewise, the data assets lineage can be pictorially traced by Data consumers and producers through the data catalog feature in Microsoft Purview. With the data catalog feature in Microsoft Purview, Important datasets can be discovered through simple web-based search. It also aid confirmation of specific data of interest from trusted sources or not through the interactive data lineage visualization tools. Business intelligence, and machine learning (ML) initiatives are also improved through this feature, by estimating the data origin. For more information on this, Check the Data Catalog platform
• Data Estate Insights
With the Microsoft Purview Data Estate Insights, your organization’s data officials and other governing decision makers can get a bird’s eye view of their data estate, gather actionable insights into the gaps, and propose resolving techniques. All the sensitive data across your organization will be discovered, data heredity tracked, and a business reference glossary created with help of sensitivity labels. Visit the Data Insights platform for more information on this.
• Data Sharing
With the Microsoft Purview Data Sharing feature, your organization can share data both within the organization or across organizations with business partners and customers. This feature enables sharing or receiving of data with just a few clicks. Data providers can principally manage and monitor data sharing correlation, and reverse sharing at any time. Data consumers can access received data with their own analytics tools and turn data into insights. Check the Data Sharing platform for more details.
2.)Overcoming Operational and Data Silos
What Is a Data Silo?
Data Silo is the art of keeping data in numerous location or separated from other sections of the organization. A variety of data warehouses are utilized by the marketing and sales teams. Alignment difficulties which occur due to separate sectors of the organization accessing different systems or data sources can be mitigated using the Microsoft Purview. In certain conditions, varying information which often lead to different teams within the organization analyzing data and reaching conflicting conclusions can also be addressed with the Microsoft Purview,
Four primary reasons for Data Silo existence:
- Organizational Working Structure
- Organizational Structure
- Multiple Technologies
- Organizational Funding
Overall, the appropriate Data Silo solution maximizes organizational efficiency and consistency while integrating your organization’s data and systems. It helps save time and money through efficient integration all of your separate data sources while ensuring adequate transformation of data culture and management for the better.
3.) Increase in business agility
Microsoft Purview also contributes to increasing business agility across the globe. For instance: A foremost US-based retail multinational company aspired to transform its data for suppliers and consumers into actionable operational and inventory insights (specifically focused on Sales, Inventory, and E-commerce). However, this retail company was tussling with numerous data problems such as data quality, data inconsistency, data inventory, ineffective data management, data propagation, hereditary problems, and lack of transparency, etc. The WinWire team, an extension to the Microsoft Engineering team, assisted the users to initiate data governance solutions, organized an in-depth analysis of Azure Purview, and provided the report to their product development team for feature inclusions. This organization now conveniently created chances for data and insight revenue, built a scalable method to offer a better experience to consumers, suppliers, and partners, improved business agility, and established a viable source of data trust for the future growth of their clients. All these were achieved with Microsoft Purview.
4.)Compliance with industry regulations for risk management
Globally, compliance has always been a cogent concern for businesses, Organizations and Government Agencies. Whether you’re interested in following regulations unique to your organization or ensuring compliance with a series of policies specific to your company, it is imperative to have the necessary strategy in place. Microsoft Purview “Communication Compliance” an Insider Risk offering has been designed to mitigate communication issues. This Microsoft Purview service assists users to detect, capture, and respond to inappropriate messages in Teams.
With Microsoft Purview, business organizations can examine inflow and outflow communications, for policy matches with business policies and strategies, and appoint reviewers to probe issues related to cyber security. These solution assists business leaders and stakeholders implementing the following: Corporate Policies, Risk management, Regulatory Compliance etc.
- Corporate policies: This requires compliance from users with definite ethical standards and approved use policies in all business conversations. With this, harassments, threats, offensive and inappropriate language can be minimized when adopted by business organizations.
- Risk management: The use of communication compliance policies within Microsoft Purview helps to detect and minimize potential legal and risk challenges, thereby reducing these problems before they occur. For example, scanning of messages throughout your organization for unapproved conflicts of interest and distribution of private data can be achieved.
Overall, Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance service can access a new interactive dashboard for reviewers and examiners. Here, tracking of alerts and policy matches can be carried out by users. Proactive, intelligent alerts are also received when an issue requires urgent attention. Pending issues can be sorted by severity and filtered through users and policy types.
5.) Gaining insights into data use across the estate
Microsoft Purview data insights offer a wealth of information that aids data comprehension. From the extensive view across your data of Asset Insights to an in-depth view to act on specific assets, to understanding the sensitivity of data with Classification labels. Microsoft Purview Data Insights creates extensive insight across your data estate and permits you to drill into report data, understand your data, govern your data, govern your data glossary, and address anomalies in your data estate from inside the Azure Purview experience.
Conclusion
As the data security landscape continues to evolve, organizations face a variety of risk that extends well beyond native cyber security. That’s why Microsoft Purview should be employed as a comprehensive approach tool for data security, governance, and management. This tool doesn’t only helps in protecting threats from coming outside your organization but also those that can erupt within your organization.
