Reinvent Data Governance With Azure Pureview

Microsoft has launched a new software exclusively dedicated to data governance. Pureview has been created to be the environment for businesses to apply all data management, protection, control and governance policies. According to Microsoft, Pureview is "a unified data governance service". Reinventing data governance has never been this easy!

In this article you will find...

• Importance and Fundamentals of Data Governance
• What Does Azure Pureview Do?
• Azure Pureview's Most Significant Perks

Data has become a valuable asset for companies and even a competitive advantage for business activation and differentiation. As the value of data has increased, the difficulty of managing and taking advantage of it without falling into bad practices or unnecessary investments has increased. Because of this, data governance processes have become essential for businesses.

Importance and Fundamentals of Data Governance

Companies work with an ever-increasing amount of information and, as a company grows, the amount of data it needs multiplies. In this sense, data governance policies are fundamental for organizations to manage large amounts of data and ensure data quality, that they comply with data protection standards and that their data is secure.

The basic functions of data governance policies range from choosing the right data storage, analysis and integration technologies, to creating policies that guarantee data security, consolidation and quality.  Ensuring the integrity of each process, specifying the quantity and form of storage, tracking data from its origin until it is transformed into insights or enabling restrictions and access authorizations are some of the decisive tasks of the individual in charge of data governance within an organization.

What Does Azure Pureview Do?

Azure Pureview is Microsoft's new creation made for supporting data governance processes, whether in cloud, multi-cloud or SaaS environments. Microsoft describes the capabilities of the new software as follows: "Easily create a holistic, up-to-date map of your data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, and end-to-end data lineage. Empower data consumers to find valuable, trustworthy data."

Among its most prominent features, Pureview Data Map stands out. It allows the creation of a unified map of all the organization's data, with the ability to automate and manage metadata, classify data with confidentiality tags and built-in classifiers, and integrate all data systems using Apache Atlas APIs.

Pureview also includes its own data catalog through which you have acces to external data. The catalog is powered by an intelligent search engine that understands technical and business terms and facilitates data understanding through its ability to examine associated technical, corporate, semantic and operational metadata. In addition, the catalog includes an interactive data lineage visualization that detects data's originary sources, informs whether they can be trusted and identifies data's level of confidentiality.

Pureview also helps optimize business intelligence resources thanks to its ability to examine the working environments of Power BI, Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Analytics, detecting resources and data lineages that can be automatically published on the platform's map. Understanding data's supply chain, from raw data until it is transformed into valuable information, makes it possible to conclude, in a few clicks, the analysis and reports that already exist.

Azure Pureview's Most Significant Perks

In addition to what has already been explained and to simplifying and greatly facilitating complicated data governance processes, Pureview also brings numerous business benefits:

• Unified data governance service through which you can control all SQL data and automatically perform data inspections and classifications by connecting SQL Server to Pureview Data Map.
• Glossary of business terms: Pureview contains a business glossary that allows you to organize terms in business language —with no need to use Excel dictionaries—, import data dictionaries that already have and detect data more easily. 
• Discover sensitive data across your organization by visually examining the location of sensitive data through labels or classifications and exploring the details of each data asset in depth. You can also apply Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels. 
• Data security: Pureview has an integrated security and data protection service backed by more than 3,500 data security experts. 
• Data compliance: Using this tool you can confirm that the processing, transfer and treatment of data complies with EU data protection regulations.

Azure Pureview is, therefore, the ideal service to simply and effectively carry out data governance processes with total certainty that the data is protected, of high quality and ready to be used in business intelligence processes.