Introduction to Microsoft Purview
As the volume and variety of data increases, the challenges of effective data governance will only grow more difficult. Digital transformation technologies have resulted in an explosion of new data sources. How do users know what data is available? How do administrators manage data when they may not know what type of data exists and where it’s stored? Does the data contain sensitive or personal information?
All these questions are typically not easy to answer without insights into the data and the source of storage. Before you can develop solid data-governance plans for storage and usage, it’s important to have a good idea of the data your organization uses.
Example scenario
Suppose you’re a data consumer or producer of data. You may be a business or technical data analyst, data scientist, or data engineer. You likely spend significant time on manual processes to annotate, catalog, and find trusted data sources.
Because there’s no central location to register data sources, users might be unaware of a data source unless they come into contact with it as part of another process.
Annotating data sources with descriptive metadata is often a lost effort. Client applications typically ignore descriptions that are stored in the data source. Creating documentation for data sources can be difficult, and it’s an ongoing responsibility to keep documentation in sync with data sources. Users might not trust documentation that’s perceived as being out of date.
Not having an end-to-end data lineage across the data estate leads to data consumers spending a lot of time tracing root-cause problems created by upstream data pipelines that other teams own. Further, data producers make changes to their dataset and inadvertently impact downstream reports that are business or mission critical.
Microsoft Purview is designed to address these issues and to help enterprises get the most value from their existing information assets. The catalog makes data sources easily discoverable and understandable by the users who manage the data.
What will we be doing?
We’ll get a high-level overview of Microsoft Purview and discover the key aspects that make it the tool of choice for mapping out your enterprise data. We’ll learn how it can help you:
- Manage and govern your data across various platforms and locations.
- Map out your data landscape.
- Classify sensitive data.
- Empower customers to find trustworthy data.
What is the main goal?
By the end of this session, you’ll be able to decide if Microsoft Purview is the right choice to help you manage your enterprise data environment and get a handle on your various data sources.