By 2025, the volume of data generated per year is expected to grow to 175 zettabytes (ZB)¹. Yet, most organizations aren’t prepared to properly govern all this data. As a data professional in charge of managing this influx of data, are you prepared to answer questions like where did my organization’s data come from? Is the access and usage of that data by different departments compliant? And what regulatory requirements govern that data?

The number and types of data sources are also multiplying. Data may be stored on-premises, across different public clouds, and in a multitude of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. Tracking all this data manually in Excel or in another spreadsheet will become increasingly difficult and cumbersome. An organization that does not have an automated and holistic understanding of its entire data estate across these different sources will find it increasingly challenging to adapt quickly to changing market and regulatory conditions.

The need for a comprehensive data management and data governance service has never been stronger. That is why we built Azure Purview, a unified data governance solution that helps organizations achieve a complete understanding of their data regardless of if it’s housed on-premises in services like SQL Server and Oracle, in different clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, or in SaaS applications like Salesforce. You can easily create a unified map of your data assets and their relationships with automated data discovery and sensitive data classification, get insight into the location and movement of sensitive data across your hybrid landscape, and empower data consumers to find valuable data through a data catalog.

Azure Purview further extends your existing Microsoft and Azure investments by allowing you to quickly and easily add data governance capabilities to your current workloads. For analytics, Azure Purview is deeply integrated with Azure Synapse Analytics so you can search and interact with Azure Purview assets from within the Azure Synapse Studio. Azure Purview captures the lineage relationships between data assets all the way from raw data to business insights. These relationships are captured automatically and kept up to date with turnkey integrations of Azure Purview with SQL Server, Microsoft Power BI, Azure SQL, and more. Additionally, Azure Purview’s automated data classification uses more than 200 prebuilt and custom classifiers to detect sensitive data types such as business terms, government IDs, names, location data, and more. Furthermore, Azure Purview’s integration with Microsoft Information Protection ensures that sensitivity labels you have already defined in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center can be applied consistently.

It’s exciting to see customers rapidly adopting Azure Purview for their data management needs. London Heathrow Airport, for example, has already achieved tremendous success with Azure Purview. To keep weather disruptions, aircraft delays, and global pandemics from disrupting operations and to identify growth opportunities, Heathrow needed an effectively managed data estate. Heathrow’s data scientists use Azure Purview to better understand data fields and give more people the opportunity to analyze data and extract insights. The airport’s data teams also use lineage data in Azure Purview to find correlations between datasets. This is critical to determining how each airport service affects broader operations.

“We used to have a lot of data about things we generally already understood but now that we’ve adopted Azure Purview, we have insight into the unknown, meaning we can aggregate multiple data sources in a more user-friendly way to discover where we can create efficiencies and make better predictions.”

—Dave Draffin, Azure Cloud and Data Architect, Heathrow Airport

Today, we are excited to announce that Azure Purview is generally available. Every organization can now build a unified data governance solution to maximize the value of their data in the cloud.

Get started today

• Watch the “Maximize the Value of Your Data in the Cloud” digital event on-demand for demos and deep dives on Azure Purview features.
• Get started quickly and easily with a new Azure Purview account to try the generally available features.
• Explore the “Introduction to Azure Purview” MS Learn module to familiarize yourself with our data governance solution.
• Check this blog for updates starting October 6, 2021, to learn how to use the latest Azure Purview features. We will be posting weekly blogs for a limited time on the Azure Purview Tech Community site and also including a link to the latest Tech Community blog here for quick reference.

• October 6, 2021: Get started with Azure Purview in less than 5 minutes
• October 13, 2021: Automatically scale your catalog with elastic Data Map in Azure Purview
• October 20, 2021: Govern your entire data estate with Azure Purview
• October 27, 2021: Govern multi-cloud sources with Azure Purview
• November 3, 2021: Microsoft Power BI and Azure Purview work better together
• November 10, 2021: SQL Server and Azure Purview work better together
• November 17, 2021: Azure SQL and Azure Purview work better together
• November 24, 2021: Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Purview work better together
• December 1, 2021: Browse and search relevant data in the Azure Purview Data Catalog
• December 15, 2021: Advanced resource sets in Azure Purview

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References

¹IDC Data Age 2025, Dave Reinsel, The Digitization of the World from Edge to Core