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Activate your data responsibly in the era of AI with Microsoft Purview

  • By Rudra Mitra, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Data Security, Governance and Compliance
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This week, teams across Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview are gathered in Stockholm, Sweden, for the inaugural European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference. Attendees are in for an immersive experience with 130 sessions, 4 keynotes, 10 workshops, an expo hall, and a vibrant community lounge.

The Microsoft Purview team and I are thrilled to showcase the latest innovations in Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric, designed to help customers secure, govern, and manage their complex data estates in the AI era. We’re excited to announce the preview of Microsoft Purview Information Protection, which allows for content restriction in Fabric using sensitivity labels, and Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention policies for lakehouses. Additionally, we’re highlighting the recent general availability of the Microsoft Purview Data Governance solution.

Get started with Microsoft Purview

Customers are asking for a seamless solution that turns data security, governance, and compliance into a team sport to effectively address the converging trends across 1. scale and sophistication of data threats; 2. increasing regulations; 3. ever-expanding data estate; and 4. acceleration of AI adoption within the business.

Microsoft Purview delivers a comprehensive set of solutions that can help your organization secure, govern, and manage data for compliance and regulatory needs, wherever it lives. As we engage with customers at the Fabric Conference this week, we underscore the pivotal role of security and governance in laying the groundwork for responsible analytics. For businesses all over the world, this comprehensive approach balances the need to secure and protect data from cyberthreats with the need to activate data for business insights and AI.

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Integrated with Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric are committed to delivering a rich integrated experience so customers can seamlessly secure and govern their data estate efficiently to help meet regulatory, compliance, and privacy requirements while ensuring high-quality data for data activation. For Fabric customers, this means you can discover, secure, govern, and manage Fabric items from within Microsoft Purview as a single pane of glass across your heterogeneous data estate.

Microsoft Purview helps you seamlessly discover data assets in OneLake, extend the same Microsoft Purview data security sensitivity labels and policies from Microsoft 365 to Fabric items, and curate your Fabric data assets into a single enterprise data catalog along with other data sources like Azure Databricks, Snowflake, and Google Big Query. And this seamless integration doesn’t require any data movement or duplication, helping you reduce data sprawl and silos.

Seamlessly secure your data

Microsoft Purview Data Security capabilities are already loved and leveraged by customers around the world for their Microsoft 365 data, and with today’s announcements, we are extending this value further to Microsoft Fabric customers. These added investments enhance the Microsoft Purview Data Security capabilities already available for Fabric released in March.

Now in preview, Microsoft Purview Information Protection now includes the ability to restrict access to content based on sensitivity labels for Fabric data, which helps you discover, classify, and protect sensitive information, including the ability to apply sensitivity labels. By extending the sensitivity label support to Fabric data, security admins can now use sensitivity labels to manage who has access to Fabric items with certain labels. For example, a security admin could restrict access to data items with a “financial data” sensitivity label to only users in the finance department.

Image of Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity label functionality, including restricting access.

We are also extending support for Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (Purview DLP) policies for your Fabric items. Purview DLP helps an organization protect sensitive data and reduce the risk of data oversharing by letting organizations define and apply policies. With these new integrations, security admins can now apply Purview DLP policies to Fabric data. As an example, a policy can be set to help detect the upload of sensitive data, like social security numbers to a lakehouse in Fabric. If detected, the policy will trigger an automatic audit activity, which can alert the security admin, and can also surface a custom policy tip to data owners to take action and remedy the non-compliance with the policy.

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention detecting the upload of sensitive data in Fabric.

Learn more about Microsoft Purview Data Security integrations in Fabric.

Confidently activate your data

Microsoft Purview’s new data governance experience was made generally available on September 1, 2024. This newly reimagined solution is purpose-built for federated data governance and offers a business-friendly experience, AI-powered experiences for dramatic efficiencies, and all the key ingredients you’d expect, including catalog curation, data quality management, actionable insights, rich user experiences, and integration with third-party data management solutions—helping organizations to confidently activate their data for analytics and AI.

Microsoft Fabric customers can complement the governance capabilities in Fabric for a single-pane-of-glass experience in Microsoft Purview for data catalog curation, data user access, data quality management, health controls, and actionable insights for Fabric items and for data assets across your heterogeneous data environment.

A complete solution for the modern data governance practice

Data Catalog management offers a business-friendly experience and terms, making it easy to logically build a data catalog for your unique business needs while built-in AI serves up recommendations based on your active metadata. Data owners and data stewards can easily participate across data curation and management, responsible data access, and impact analysis—easily combining data assets from the heterogenous data estate (for example: Fabric, Databricks, Snowflake, and Google). Data users can seamlessly and securely request access to data assets for use in insights, analysis, development, and AI.

The Microsoft Purview Dashboard Data Catalog dashboard view.

Data Health management offers a rich experience across data quality capabilities, actionable insights, and health reports, which help organizations to assess and action the quality of their governed data estate—making it easy and efficient to support a strong healthy data governance posture. With complete data quality capabilities, you can apply built-in rules and AI-generated rules that are applied and translate into data quality scores and actions across your data assets, data products, and governance domains, helping you to more effectively manage and improve your data governance posture. Data Health controls enable data stewards and chief data officers to assess the health of their data estate through the lens of industry-recognized standards and controls. While the control rules are established at a global level, execution is delegated to individual governance domains, allowing for the application of broad standards while meeting the specific needs of various groups within the organization.

Image of the Microsoft Purview Data Health Controls dashboard.

Purpose-built integration with industry-leading master data management and data modeling solutions extend the value of Microsoft Purview further and help customers maximize their existing data management investments.

  • CluedIn brings native master data management and Data Quality functionality to Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Purview, and the Azure stack. Learn more about CluedIn. 
  • Profisee Master Data Management is a complimentary and necessary piece of your data governance strategy. Learn more about Profisee. 
  • Semarchy combines master data management, data intelligence, and data integration into a singular application in any environment. Learn more about Semarchy.  
  • RELTIO’s AI-powered data unification and management solutions unify data from disparate sources, delivering a single source of truth. Learn more about RELTIO.
  • ER/Studio (an Idera company) delivers advanced data modeling and metadata management to help organizations improve their data posture. Learn more about ER/Studio.

The general availability release also delivered new data governance capability not previously available during preview. Some of these new capabilities include: customers can now delete business concepts, more easily manage data access through the data catalog admin settings, view data product access request workflows, browse an enterprise glossary to better understand terms, and apply the Data Quality capabilities to Azure Synapse, Databricks Unity Catalog, Fabric Lakehouse, Google Big Query (preview), and Snowflake. Check out the complete list of new capabilities in Microsoft Purview Data Governance.

Learn more about Microsoft Purview

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.