Introduction
Many firms have come to the awareness that they are taking an unknown risk if they don't know what data they have, where it's stored, who has access to it, and where it's being transferred to. GDPR and CCPA reinforced this reality. Most businesses view their data as a strategic asset and are searching for the best technology to reduce the risk involved in storing, mining, and managing it. A data governance solution called Azure Purview enables you to fully comprehend all the data in your data estate and control how it is used. It is based on Apache Atlas, an open-source initiative for the governance of data assets and metadata management.
Azure Purview is employed majorly for 2 reasons:1
- The first includes when one needs to know what data the company has, where it comes from, and what value it can be mined for. These personas are in addition to the C-Suite, whose jobs may be on the line if there is a significant data breach.
- The second one about the entire data estate, including what data we have, can we trust it, where it is stored, what information is sensitive, what risks are involved in storing this specific Personal Identifiable Information (PII) in this manner, and who has access to it.
Key features and Benefits
Azure Purview, in public preview, aims to consolidate all of your data for better data management, governance, and visibility. The main attributes of Azure Purview are covered here, along with how it helps with data governance issues.
Bridging data types and formats
Companies frequently struggle with interoperability because diverse platforms and applications produce data in a variety of formats and kinds, from files to columnar data. There are no simple methods for connecting these data types without much time and effort. But this is made simple using Azure Purview. The administrator only needs to select the data types and formats that must be scanned and indexed by going to the classification settings. Purview reads the metadata and presents all connected data, regardless of the kind of format, in the search results.
Improved data governance
The act of creating policies to guarantee that you have total control over your data throughout its lifespan is known as data governance. Additionally, it establishes roles within an organisation that governs who has access to data and how it may be utilized.
Administrators and data scientists can quickly understand the overall state of the data and gain important insights into it, such as the location of sensitive information, the level of data generation, and more, thanks to Azure Purview, which provides a bird's-eye view of the entire landscape. This helps address the challenges of data governance.
They may thus configure alerts and notifications to keep track of the status and condition of data throughout the company.
Data Usability
It's simple to conduct analytics on data when it's all in one location to acquire the desired insights. However, this approach gets challenging if they are dispersed across several systems.
With a simplified user interface that encourages communication between data providers and consumers, Azure Purview seeks to address this issue. To comprehend the business context related to the data, for instance, business users and IT specialists can engage with the same data.
The unstructured and semi-structured data are too indexed and presented, making them very pertinent and valuable.
Data Discovery
Your data is dispersed across cloud, on-premises, SaaS, databases, etc., making it harder to use.
Without requiring data to be transferred between systems or formats, Azure Purview automatically finds and categorises data. You can see where the data is located thanks to the indexing of all the information and creating a comprehensive data map.
Even more specific information, including the location of the data, is provided for every search result. When you click on it, a wealth of detailed information appears, including the table name, the fields, the data types kept in each field, and more.
Tracking the Origin
You may gain the necessary insights by following the data throughout its existence, which provides a richer context. Once more, monitoring the origins demands a lot of resources because we produce a lot of data every second.
To help you better understand how data has changed and how this may have a substantial impact on how it is utilized, Azure Purview maintains and visualizes the lineage of data from the point at which it was produced throughout its entire existence.
You may determine whether the data has originated from a reliable source by looking at the data lineage and its derivative forms. This may play a significant role in data mapping and comprehension and goes beyond the straightforward key-value pair mappings seen in data governance systems.
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