Microsoft has announced that its new Purview Data Governance solution will be generally available from September 1, 2024, including an embedded Copilot. Since its launch in early April, Microsoft claims usage of the platform has increased fourfold at more than 1,500 commercial entities.

Rohan Kumar, V-P for the Microsoft Security Platform and Purview, said, “The unification of data security and governance capabilities in Microsoft Purview reflects our belief that our customers need a simpler approach to data. Microsoft Purview’s modern data governance solution addresses the challenges of the AI era with a business-friendly solution that empowers organizations to confidently democratize their data.”

He stated that Purview Data Governance has evolved from Microsoft’s own shift from a centralized approach to a federated governance structure.

“This allowed individual business units to manage their own data quality while staying in sync with the main data office to maintain policy efficacy,” said Kumar.

Copilot will be embedded to guide users in getting started with the solution, for instance recommending best practices to create an enterprise catalogue, and to ways to discover, curate, and manage data.

To eliminate the drudgery of tasks surrounding manual classification and tagging of data, AI has been infused at every layer of the experience to help automate manual tasks and accelerate data curation, data management, and data discovery.

“For example, data stewards can now generate data quality rules automatically, saving hours of manual work. Data consumers can quickly find data products by specifying the data they are looking for in their natural language.

“With the power of AI, you can automate tasks like assigning business domains, providing glossary terms, and setting data quality rules and objectives and key results (OKRs) to make your data easily discoverable by the line of business users,” said Kumar.

The integrated Microsoft Purview portal will provide a centralized solution for data classification, labelling, lineage, audit logging, and management across a variety of platforms, including the built-in integration with Microsoft Fabric.

The new experience also offers comprehensive data governance capabilities such as the extraction of metadata, scanning, and data quality across additional sources including SQL, ADLS, Synapse Analytics, as well as third-party sources such as Databricks and Snowflake.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/security/business/microsoft-purview