What is Azure Purview?

05 November 2021 at 10:00 by ParTech Media - Post a comment

Leveraging data the ‘right’ way can empower your organization in the ‘right’ direction. On the other hand, when data is unorganized and siloed across multiple systems, the entire system becomes a mess.

Siloed data can threaten your data integrity, deplete your resources and make it impossible to collaborate. This is increasingly becoming a pain point for enterprises. Most of the enterprises are eager to use data-heavy technologies like predictive analytics, but fail to give proper attention to -

  • Whether the data they are using is compliant
  • Whether they have the right to use customer’s data
  • Whether the data they possess is reliable
  • Who has access to it and made changes to it

This is where Azure Purview comes into the picture. It keeps tabs on your data scattered across multiple domains and gives better control over your data. As a data governance service, Azure Purview addresses the teething problem of managing siloed data by providing a unified landscape and data lineage across multiple systems. This, in turn, provides better transparency.

In this post, we will understand everything about Azure Purview including its capability and components.

Table of Contents

  1. Capabilities and components of Azure Purview
  2. Pricing
  3. Summary

Capabilities and components of Azure Purview

As stated above, Azure Purview is an integrated data governance service that helps you manage your enterprise data in multi-cloud environments, on-premises(your corporate network), and SaaS data.

Azure Purview has the following three components -

Azure Purview Data Map

The Azure Purview Data Map is a cloud-native Product as a Service(PaaS) solution that extracts metadata of corporate entity data from on-premises and cloud operating systems. The data map is automatically updated with a classification of data and has an automatic built-in scanning for changes in data. This means you need not update new data into the data map every time. Business owners can use this data map to keep tabs on their data with its easy and interactive UI while developers can interact with this data map by using open source Apache APIs.

In the data map, you can see all of your data in one place, schedule the scanning of data resources and segregate data into collections. If you prefer table view, you can use the slider called table view.

Viewing your data in table view provides you with additional information like scans per data source and the date when the data source was captured. You can’t view all this in the map view.

Purview Data Catalog

Purview data catalog helps you in discovering semantic data terms associated with the business along with technical aspects of your enterprise data. This data catalog retrieves data from trusted sources while also maintaining the sensitivity of data labels. This also helps in representing clear data lineage, empowering data scientists and business analysts to drive BI analytics and AI initiatives in the data lake.

From a data supply chain view, i.e the transformation of valuable data into business insights, the following features are supported by Purview data catalog -

  1. It scans your power BI and Azure analytics workspaces and pushes all the data and lineage to Purview in a single click.
  2. It provides different means of classification based on source types, file type, file size, and sensitivity labels.
  3. It eliminates the conventional excel data formats by introducing business-grade enterprise glossaries.

Azure Data Purview insights

You can gain valuable data insights about your data management activities using Azure Data Purview Insights. Here are its features -

  1. You can get the current status of your data management activities by running data scans, completed scans, or even canceled ones.
  2. You get a 360-degree view of your data lake, classify sensitive data zones and manage traffic, leading to no downtime and faster transmission of data across the network.

Azure Purview is designed in such a way that it provides a no-code experience to data engineers to build data pipelines. It teams up with data scientists to build machine learning models. And helps business analysts for report generation purposes in conjunction with tools like Power BI.

Pricing

Azure Purview is cost-efficient for your enterprise when it comes to data management and monitoring your data lake across multiple networks. It eliminates the need for custom-built and personal data gauging systems and encourages pay-as-you-go. This means you only pay for the resources you use. A Purview account consists of a data map of at least 1 capacity unit. 1 capacity unit allows you to perform 25 data map operations per second and provides 2 GB of storage for data assets.

Tapping into new technologies

Azure Purview has brought in some innovations in the open-source community like the Apache Atlas, a platform for data management and data governance. It also leverages disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to return optimized results from data searches and intelligent scanning and classifying of data. Also by infusing networking algorithms, raw data assets can be converted to business context with the help of Azure Purview.

Summary

Microsoft has recently launched the Azure Purview to bridge the gaps between data inconsistencies in enterprises. Enterprises are not only expected to offer their technological capability to their customers but also align their business model to their customers. No one wants to trust a business that offers technology on one end and struggles to maintain its data integrity at the other end. So to get this equation right, Azure Purview can help organizations strengthen their data management aspects and align their business goals without compromising on customers’ data. It can achieve this by ensuring that its data is compliant with the security standards. Azure Purview is also being used by leading data analytics companies to solve their transparency concerns and standardize their data compliance aspects.

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