This article was originally written by Avanade alum Aravind Sridharan.

This article was also co-authored by Avanade alum Natalie Greenwood

“When we talk about assets on the balance sheet, data deserves its own row” – Satya Nadella. We whole heartedly agree. As you can imagine, data within organizations is growing at exponential rates. In fact, 90% of data today was created in just the last two years. And by 2025, 80% of data will be unstructured data. This influx of data is creating new challenges for organizations that are eager to leverage these new data sources as an asset.

If you are experiencing any of the issues listed below, you probably have a data governance (DG) problem. And more specifically, you probably have a DG technology gap within your organization.

• No visibility into what data exists within the organization
• Lack of clarity around ownership of the data
• Perceived data quality issues due to lack of metadata
• Confusion related to terms or definitions
• Duplicate work efforts

The above examples can create operational inefficiencies, confusion related to data and information being distributed internally and externally, and poor business decisions based on bad or misunderstood data. And that is just the tip of the spear. GDPR and CCPA are putting a spotlight on data privacy.

Regulators are cracking down on companies that are not compliant. As new laws and regulations are established, the ability to track, manage, and report on your data assets from inception, to consumption, to archival, or retention and/or disposition will be critical. Enabling an enterprise data governance program and leveraging the appropriate technology to ensure visibility into the organizations data assets is an important initial step.

Additional benefits of enabling an enterprise DG program include:

• Reduced operating costs associated with manual data entry / reconciliations
• Decreased IT maintenance/ support costs
• Improved overall customer experience by enabling insights into customer behavior/ patterns faster and facilitate 360 view to drive personalized experiences at scale

Microsoft Azure Purview
Microsoft continues to evolve their Azure Data Service offerings with the introduction of Azure Purview. It is a unified data governance service that helps you manage and govern your on-premises, multi-cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) data. Purview creates a holistic, up-to-date map of your data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, and end-to-end data lineage. Purview empowers data consumers to find valuable, trustworthy data.

Capabilities:

• Automated data discovery, lineage identification, and data classification across on-premises, multi-cloud, and SaaS sources.
• Unified map of your data assets and their relationships for more effective governance. Semantic search enables data discovery using business or technical terms
• Insights into the location and movement of sensitive data across your hybrid data landscape

Purview is available for public preview – see screenshot below. There is currently no licensing cost associated with Purview; you pay for what you use. The pay per use model offered by Microsoft as part of Public Preview is exciting for Microsoft customers looking to move quickly without having to create a business case to secure additional budget.

The real icing on the cake is that your data is secure! Microsoft has invested more than USD 1 billion annually on cybersecurity research and development and employs more than 3,500 security experts dedicated to security and privacy. In short, Microsoft takes security very seriously. Azure has more compliance certifications than any other cloud providers in the world.

Avanade is helping Microsoft Azure customers realize the value of their data by providing the following data governance services:

• Data governance assessments and enablement
• Purview enablement
  • Workflow, user enablement, and technical support (Purview setup and configuration)
  • Integration
  • On-going support

Bottom line, if you are a current Microsoft customer, Purview is a no-brainer. The technology is available, cost effective and offers key capabilities that most organizations do not have access to today.

Please reach out if you would like to start a conversation.