Azure Purview was generally available (GA) in September 2021 as a cloud-native data governance solution enabling organizations to manage their data assets on-premises, multi-cloud, and software-as-a-service data with an objective to empower stakeholders to find enterprise data to unlock their intrinsic values, deriving insights, gaining operational and strategic advantages. It was April 2022 when Microsoft unified Azure Purview and Microsoft 365 Compliance Portfolio into one single product, Microsoft Purview, with the aim of governing the data landscape and providing security to data where it resides.

What is Microsoft Purview Data Governance?

Microsoft Purview Data Governance is a unified data governance solution for managing and governing on-premises, multi-cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) data. It will be generally available beginning September 1, 2024.

Interestingly, Microsoft also revealed other new features, such as a built-in Copilot in Microsoft Purview for data governance, better connections with Microsoft Fabric, and expanding the partner network to help organizations use their data estate with confidence.

Microsoft Purview evolved over time to embrace the future of technological advancements to create an up-to-date unified map of enterprise data assets with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, and lineage, all the way leveraging OpenAI and AI-ML based trustworthy data management where producers, protectors, and consumers of data work collaboratively to maximize information value chain of data-information-knowledge-insight–action (DIKIA).

Making Data Accessible and Secure for a Hybrid World

Every business needs data. However, data must be simple to access, understand, control, and secure to foster innovation and growth. Nearly half of the organizations that responded to the Enterprise Strategy Group survey indicated that at least half of their data was dark (retained but unused or unknown). The move to hybrid work mode aggravated the problem, as there are high levels of digital transformation and environments with many different devices, apps, and clouds.

Microsoft Purview makes data distributed across environments and platforms accessible through a unified data catalog for discovery and automated AI-driven and custom classification, as well as seamless integration with analytics tools. With robust data governance policy management with role-based access control and real-time enforcement of Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Purview ensures data is easily accessible to authorized users and protected against unauthorized access and breaches, meeting regulatory compliance requirements.

Microsoft Purview Data Governance: Ensuring AI Compliance

Gartner predicts that by 2027, at least one global company may face an AI deployment ban by a regulator due to its noncompliance with data protection or AI governance legislation.

Many products that tried to address data protection, governance, and compliance in the market often work in isolation, leading to increasing data management complexities and costs.

With AI transformation driving innovation, Microsoft Purview, a comprehensive data security and governance solution, ensures secure and compliant AI deployment. It continues to adapt to meet the evolving data safety and management needs, ensuring compliance and incorporating the latest features.

What sets Microsoft Purview apart is its unique platform that seamlessly integrates information protection, data governance, risk management, and compliance across various data estates, including multi-cloud and multiplatform environments. Purview helps users secure and govern different types of data (structured, unstructured, and AI-enabled data) across multiple clouds. It also accounts for existing and future data security, governance, and AI regulations. Purview simplifies data security and governance by providing a unified experience.

What’s new in Microsoft Purview Data Governance

As work models change to embrace the cloud and hybrid modes, data is dispersed across different places, such as cloud platforms, devices, and on-site solutions. Microsoft’s Purview, now with the help of AI, has brought advanced AI capabilities to ensure that vast and varied data estate in hybrid work models and into the cloud are secured and governed.  Some of the new features in this blog are generally available (GA), while others are in preview at the time of writing this article. The rest of this blog provides a glimpse of new and upcoming features that will make Microsoft Purview a strong contender in the data governance and compliance product offerings space, along with other mainstream providers.

New Microsoft Purview Portal

The new Microsoft Purview Portal (preview), with its streamlined design and modern, unified experience, provides a comprehensive suite of solutions for data governance, data security, and compliance in one place. It helps organizations discover and protect data stored across Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Snowflake, and other cloud platforms and applications.

This new portal provides management of single-entry point settings, search, roles, and permissions. Earlier, the classic portal split the governance and compliance solutions into separate portals. The classic Microsoft Purview Compliance Portal will be retired by the end of 2024.

New Microsoft Purview Data Catalog Experience

The new data catalog (preview) is more attuned to creating business value by making data more visible to data consumers, owners, and stewards with a unified experience from one place. The federated approach of governance provides a centralized place for data safety, quality, and standards while providing tools to create self-service access control, discoverability, and maintenance.

The new Microsoft Purview Data Catalog experience allows users to explore and understand data categorized by business domains using AI-powered copilot-based search capabilities and subscribe to data products with necessary data and secure access tools. Here are the outlined improved and new catalog solutions for the data governance principles:

• Data Access: Data catalog access policies, Critical data elements, Glossary terms
• Data Curation: Business domains, Data products, Health actions
• Data Discovery: Search & Browse (by business domains, data products, keywords, or copilot), Self-service access requests
• Data Health: Data estate health, Critical data elements, Data quality, Health controls, Objective and key results (OKRs)
• Data understanding: Data products, Glossary terms, OKRs

Microsoft Purview AI Hub and Communication Compliance

With Microsoft Purview AI Hub, users can quickly understand an organization’s AI usage through simple graphics and reports. It integrates with Microsoft Copilot and other LLMs. Additionally, users can safeguard data and meet regulatory requirements with one-click policies. Here’s a list of a few improvements.

• Communication Compliance

The Copilot can provide a contextual summary (using trainable classifiers) of a Teams, email, or Viva Engage message included in a policy match, saving time for investigation for content-heavy messages that also include videos, transcripts, and attachments.

• Compliance Manager

Compliance Manager assists an organization in evaluating its adherence to industry and regional regulations. Four new AI regulatory templates have been added, bringing the total to over 360 ready-to-use templates. These templates include the necessary controls and improvement actions to complete compliance assessments.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview has made its Data Loss Prevention features more resilient and adaptable to prevent critical and sensitive data loss with minimal disruption to business continuity.

Here is a list of a few noteworthy new features:

• Advanced Options: New features allow administrators to choose specific conditions and actions for Data Loss Prevention policies. For example, there is a new pause and resume capability for minimizing end-user disruption, adaptive protection integration, Customizable email templates and policy actions, Enhanced Data Loss Prevention alert investigation, and Simulation mode (GA), Which Helps fine-tune Data Loss Prevention policies before productionizing.
• Improved DLP Analytics: Leveraging ML to highlight top DLP risks and recommendations for finetuning existing DLP policies; DLP reports showing detailed information on policy matches and incidents, keeping users updated about potential data breaches.
• Enhanced UX: The tool for making DLP policies is now more user-friendly, enabling users to create policies protecting sensitive data more intuitively

Deeper Insights into Business Data Estate

Microsoft has enhanced Purview to help businesses gain deeper insights from their data estate and its usage, value, risk, and compliance providing advanced features to enable:

• Maximizing data usage: Make more of the data resources with all the new insights being uncovered.
• Enhanced Data Mapping: The extended data map brings in more sources and types, eventually painting a fuller picture of the data landscape.
• Advanced Analytics: Use of recent analytics to gain insight into recalcitrant data usage and spot the areas for improvement.
• Custom Dashboards: Design custom dashboards with the right metrics and key performance indicators that matter to meet business goals.

Enhanced Security and Compliance

The following comprehensive solutions within Microsoft Purview and its integration with various apps, OS, and systems help keep business data safe and compliant with the recent safety enhancements:

Compliance: Microsoft Purview helps businesses meet regulatory compliance requirements with a suite of solutions – communication compliance, data lifecycle management, records management, Audit-premium and Audit-standard, eDiscovery-premium and eDiscovery-standard.

Audit Logs: The logs now offer more detailed insights into user activities and data access patterns, helping users track actions more effectively for the administration of application, Microsoft Entra group, email, directory, role, site, and user. Refer here for a comprehensive list of audit log activities.

Enhanced Sensitivity Labels

Sensitivity labels in Microsoft Purview let businesses classify and protect an organization’s data as it moves within and outside of firewalls across devices, apps, and services. It allows protection through encryption with a label watermark in Microsoft Office apps across platforms and devices, third-party apps and services, containers like Teams, SharePoint, and Power BI, and assets in Purview Data Map. It even allows the application of a label without any protection settings. Microsoft Copilot recognizes the labels and protection settings while interacting with users to keep labeled data protected.

In recent months, several sensitivity labeling and protection functionalities have been extended as GA and preview to Microsoft Office apps and Teams, Windows, iOS, Android, and Copilot for Microsoft 365. Another important announcement was that the Microsoft Purview Information Protection client, which replaces the Azure Information Protection client, is now GA.

Microsoft Priva new solutions to modernize privacy programs

Priva was introduced in 2021 to protect personal data by automating the management, definition, and tracking of privacy procedures.  

Four new solutions (preview) were introduced this year: consent management, privacy assessment, subject rights requests for data beyond Microsoft 365, and Tracker scanning. Two more solutions are GA already: privacy risk management and subject rights requests for data within Microsoft 365.

The new Priva portal (preview) has been designed to provide streamlined access to all the above solutions within the Microsoft Priva portfolio.

How to manage data governance strategy efficiently with Microsoft Purview?

Microsoft Purview, though relatively new, is making its mark steadily in a complex and crowded data governance solution space where well-established players like Collibra, Informatica, Alation, and the like have dominated for a long. The perception that Purview is only suited for organizations heavily invested in Azure is bound to change in some time with its integration capabilities in multi-cloud environments of Azure, AWS, GCP, and platforms like Databricks, Snowflake, and many more.

Microsoft has a strong focus on making Purview a tool of choice for cost-effective data governance solutions that seamlessly and natively integrate with their SaaS offerings of Fabric data platform on the lakehouse foundation of OneLake for unified user experiences and a unified business model.

Microsoft Purview gives users a comprehensive view of an organization’s data across various multi-clouds and multi-platforms. Security and compliance leaders can unite data users and data defenders with Microsoft Purview to lower risks, streamline tasks, and cut costs by becoming more efficient.

Partner with WinWire for Microsoft Purview Data Governance Solution

Visit Azure Marketplace to learn how WinWire can assist your organization in implementing Microsoft Purview based data governance solution in a rapid three-week assessment study.

Watch our joint Webinar with Microsoft on how to democratize your enterprise data with Microsoft Purview.