What is Microsoft Purview? What does it do, and do I need it? These are all questions we’ve come across in recent months and in this article, we’re going to give you the answers. In short Microsoft Purview is one of the more recent additions to Microsoft’s security portfolio. It combines the former Azure Purview and Microsoft 365 compliance solutions into a single pane of glass with the focus on risk and compliance solutions from Microsoft security and unified data governance from data and AI. Keep reading to find out more about Purview and how it can help your business.
What is Microsoft Purview?
Essentially a portfolio of products, Microsoft Purview, formally known as Azure Purview, provides a single pane of glass for managing data governance by enabling automated scanning and classifying data at scale through the Microsoft Purview governance portal.
The governance portal allows you to create an all-round, up to date map of your data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification and end to end lineage. It can enable data curators and security administrators to manage and keep your data estate secure and ensure those that are accessing that data know it is valuable and trustworthy.
What does Microsoft Purview do?
As mentioned earlier, Purview brings together data governance from data and AI and compliance and risk management from Microsoft security. With this combined effort you have a comprehensive approach to your business security and data protection.
Purview enables data discovery, traceability and searchability. The benefit of this is that it helps to create more efficient business operations because it allows users to search for and discover organisational data, helping to streamline data operations and prevent duplicate or redundant projects across multiple teams.
What else can Microsoft Purview’s security toolset help with?
Microsoft Purview’s security has many uses. Here are just some of the scenarios it can assist with:
- It can provide a structured approach to improving your data compliance stance, this is shown in a single compliance score.
- It helps you to discover what data you have, where it is located and how it is being used.
- Assists you in managing your data to meet compliance requirements such as GDPR.
- Removes the manual task of governing your data to reduce risk as it allows you to control who can see and use your data.
- It helps to automatically classify data so that you can easily find where this data is stored in the estate.
- Enables you to implement protection with the proper access controls and policies to prevent the incorrect use of sensitive data.
Why is all of this so important?
The features we have mentioned in this article all make Purview a vital component of almost every organisation’s Azure cloud environment. The data discovery and traceability capabilities allow teams to operate more efficiently and eliminate the time and cost associated with building redundant dashboards and data pipelines. This then allows BI and data engineers to spend more time focusing on projects that add to the organisation’s bottom line or supporting requests for visualisations that do not already exist.
Microsoft Purview Pricing
While the pricing for Microsoft Purview (formerly Azure Purview) is on a subscription-based Pay-As-You-Go model, there are various dimensions that you can consider while budgeting. You can calculate your costs via the pricing page here.
Bear in mind that there are additional costs that need to be considered while planning and budgeting and cost management. Costs impacting Purview pricing are based on these applications:
- The Microsoft Purview Data Map
- Data Estate Insights
- You can read more about each of these points in more detail via the Microsoft website here.
Microsoft Purview gives you a holistic and practical view of your information and if you’re not yet taking advantage of it, we can help. If you’d like more information about implementing Microsoft Purview and how it would work within your business, contact our team.
