Introduction

  • 2 minutes

As the volume and variety of data increases, the challenges of good data governance are likely to become more difficult. Digital transformation technologies have resulted in new data sources. How do users know what data is available? How do administrators manage data when they might not know what type of data exists and where it's stored? Does the data contain sensitive or personal information?

All these questions aren't easy to answer without insights into the data and the source of storage. Before you can develop data-governance plans for usage and storage, you need to understand the data your organization uses.

Depiction of a pie chart that shows 81% of data is stored in multiple public cloud sources. It shows that 11% is stored in private dedicated clouds. It also shows that 7.5% is stored in one public and one or more private clouds and 0.5% is in multiple public clouds only. Icons represent various source locations for on-premises and cloud sources.

Example scenario

As a user or producer of data, you might be a business or technical data analyst, data scientist, or data engineer. You probably spend significant time on manual processes to annotate, catalog, and find trusted data sources.

Without a central location to register data sources, you might be unaware of a data source unless you come into contact with it as part of another process.

Writing metadata descriptions for data sources is often a wasted effort. Client applications typically ignore descriptions that are stored in the data source. Creating documentation for data sources is difficult because you must keep documentation in sync with data sources. Users also might not trust documentation that they think is out of date.

Without the ability to track data from end to end, you must spend time tracing problems created by data pipelines that other teams own. If you make changes to your datasets, you can accidentally affect related reports that are business or mission critical.

Microsoft Purview is designed to address these issues and help enterprises get the most value from their existing information assets. Its catalog makes data sources easy to discover and understand by the users who manage the data.

Diagram of data governance that shows a Chief Data Officer connected to one icon that represents discovery considerations and another icon that represents compliance issues.

What will we be doing?

This high-level overview of Microsoft Purview helps you discover the key aspects that make it the tool of choice for mapping out your enterprise data. You 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's the main goal?

By the end of this session, you'll be able to decide whether Microsoft Purview is the right choice to help you manage your enterprise data environment and your various data sources.