Azure Purview is a comprehensive data governance solution that helps organizations manage their data assets. It provides a unified view of all data across the organization.
With Azure Purview, you can discover, map, and catalog your data assets, making it easier to understand where your data is coming from and where it's going. This is especially useful for large organizations with complex data landscapes.
Azure Purview also provides data lineage, which is the ability to track the origin and history of your data. This feature is particularly useful for understanding data quality and identifying potential data breaches.
What is Azure Purview?
Azure Purview is a comprehensive data governance platform that helps organizations manage and govern their data across multiple sources.
It provides a single source of truth for data lineage, giving users visibility into where their data comes from and how it's processed.
Azure Purview simplifies data discovery and classification, allowing users to easily categorize and tag their data based on its sensitivity and usage.
What is Microsoft Azure Purview?
Microsoft Azure Purview is a data governance and compliance solution that helps organizations manage and govern their data assets.
It provides a unified view of an organization's data assets across different sources and systems.
With Azure Purview, you can discover, map, and catalog your data, as well as track data lineage and usage.
This helps ensure data accuracy, consistency, and compliance with regulatory requirements.
Azure Purview also enables data sharing and collaboration across different teams and organizations.
It provides a secure and controlled environment for data sharing, with features such as data classification, access control, and auditing.
What is Azure Purview?
Azure Purview is a unified data governance platform that helps you discover, map, and manage your entire data estate. It provides a single source of truth for your data assets, enabling you to make better decisions and improve data-driven outcomes.
Azure Purview is built on a scalable and secure architecture that can handle large volumes of data. This allows you to manage your data at scale, without worrying about performance or security.
With Azure Purview, you can discover and map your data assets across multiple sources, including on-premises, cloud, and SaaS applications. This helps you understand where your data is coming from and how it's being used.
Azure Purview also provides a data catalog that allows you to classify, categorize, and annotate your data assets. This helps you understand the context and meaning of your data, making it easier to make decisions and take action.
By using Azure Purview, you can improve data quality, reduce data loss, and enhance data compliance. This is because you have a single, unified view of your data, which enables you to identify and address data issues more effectively.
Data Governance
Data governance is a critical aspect of Azure Purview. It's based on four fundamental pillars: automated data lineage detection, classification, and identification; a unified map of data resources and their relationships; a glossary with technical and business search terms; and information on the location and movement of sensitive data.
Azure Purview automates the discovery of data, screening and classifying it as a service for your data asset resources. It generates a copy of the metadata in Microsoft Purview, along with a location reference, keeping the data in its current location.
The service also provides a unified map of data resources and their relationships, making it easier to manage and protect your data. This is achieved through the use of a data catalog and lineage feature, which provides a pipeline view of the entire data process from source to endpoint.
Here are the four fundamental pillars of Azure Purview's data governance:
- Automated data lineage detection, classification, and identification
- Unified map of data resources and their relationships
- Glossary with technical and business search terms
- Information on the location and movement of sensitive data
Data Governance Overview
Data governance is about managing and protecting your data, and Azure Purview is a service that helps you do just that. It automates the discovery of data by screening and classifying it, and provides a unified map of data resources and their relationships for effective governance.
Azure Purview is based on four fundamental pillars: automated data lineage detection, classification, and identification; a unified map of data resources and their relationships; a glossary with technical and business search terms; and information on the location and movement of sensitive data across the data estate.
The service is cloud-based, so your data remains in its current location. A copy of the metadata will be generated in Microsoft Purview, along with a location reference.
Here are the four pillars of Azure Purview in more detail:
- Automated data lineage detection, classification, and identification
- Unified map of data resources and their relationships
- Glossary with technical and business search terms
- Information on the location and movement of sensitive data
Azure Purview also leverages Microsoft 365's data classification system, which includes over 100 out-of-the-box classifications for sensitive data such as social security numbers, addresses, and credit card numbers. You can also create custom classifications and sensitivity labels.
Access Management
To manage access to your data, you need to manage credentials in Azure Purview. Credentials are used to quickly reuse and apply saved authentication information to data source scans.
Azure Purview requires you to use key vault to store passwords and secrets as a minimum requirement. This is a crucial step in securing your data.
To grant Purview access to Key Vault, you'll need to provide GET access permissions. This is a straightforward process that can be completed in a few steps.
Once you've created and verified connections in Purview, they'll appear in the 'Manage Key Vault Connections' section. This is where you can configure the key vault connection to use when adding new data sources and connections.
You can use key vault to extract the account key for an ADLS2 account, for example. This is a common use case for key vault connections.
In order to manage access to your data effectively, you need to understand how to lock and block data in SQL Server Management Studio.
Getting Started
To get started with Azure Purview, you'll need an Azure subscription with administrative access permissions and the ability to create resources. This is required to register the necessary Resource Providers, including Microsoft.Purview, Microsoft.Storage, and Microsoft.EventHub.
You'll also need to create a Purview account, which can be done using the Azure portal interface or programmatically using Azure PowerShell, the .NET SDK, or Python. When creating a Purview account, you'll need to select the location (Azure region) for your account, which should be the region closest to where your data resides or your users.
By default, a Purview account is created with a default Data Map size of 1 capacity unit (CU), which supports up to 25 data map operations per second and includes up to 2GB of storage for your metadata. The data map is elastic, which means it will automatically scale based on the load request up to a maximum of 100 CUs.
Azure Purview uses Azure Key Vault to securely store your data source credentials. You'll need to determine the authentication method to use, which can be Account Key, SQL Authentication, Service Principal, or Azure Purview Managed Identity.
Azure Purview Roles determine who can do what in Purview. You can assign users, Azure Active Directory Groups, or Service Principals to one of the predefined Data Plane roles: Purview Data Reader, Purview Data Curator, or Purview Data Source Administrator.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the purpose of purview?
Microsoft Purview helps organizations govern and secure their data across the entire data estate, ensuring it's protected and compliant with regulations. It's a powerful platform for data security, governance, and compliance.
Is Microsoft purview being discontinued?
Microsoft Purview Data Sharing will be retired on September 26th, 2025, and users will need to transition to Microsoft Fabric for external data sharing capabilities. This change affects data sharing workloads and requires action before the retirement date.
Is Azure Purview a data catalog?
Yes, Azure Purview offers a data catalog experience with a browse feature that allows users to explore available data. It provides a data search function to help users find what they need.
What is the new name for Azure purview?
Microsoft Purview is the new name for Azure Purview, offering a comprehensive set of solutions for data governance, protection, and management. Learn more about the benefits and features of Microsoft Purview.
Is Microsoft purview a SAAS or PaaS?
Microsoft Purview is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) solution, offering a platform for data governance that can be accessed through the internet. It's not a SAAS (Software as a Service), but rather a platform that enables you to build and manage your own data governance solutions.
Sources
- https://www.plainconcepts.com/azure-purview/
- https://coretek.com/blog/data-governance-made-simple-with-azure-purview
- https://skypoint.ai/blog/azure-purview-data-governance/
- https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/6881/getting-started-with-azure-purview-for-data-governance/
- https://3cloudsolutions.com/resources/azure-purview-series-part-scanning-and-classification/
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