In September of 2021, we announced the highly anticipated general availability of Azure Purview—a cloud-native data governance solution to enable organizations of all sizes to manage and govern their on-premises, multicloud, and software as a service (SaaS) data. Since Azure Purview was brought onto the market, thousands of organizations including London Heathrow Airport, Grundfos, and illimity have collectively discovered tens of billions of data assets as well as served up millions of searches every month to empower knowledge workers to find valuable enterprise data quickly and easily. 

Organizations that use Azure Purview have a more holistic understanding of their hybrid data estate, which is always kept up to date with automated data discovery and sensitive data classification. In addition to empowering knowledge workers, this understanding, along with insights from sensitivity, business context, and relationships between data assets is also being used by teams working under the Chief Data Officers (CDO), the Chief Information and Security Officers (CIO and CISO) and the Chief Risk and Compliance Officers (CRO and CCO) to govern, protect, and manage data more effectively.

Traditional data management solutions rely on multiple unconnected, duplicative business processes, and a patchwork of software products augmented with custom code and point-wise integrations. Dozens of products are sometimes used together to address fragments of the data governance and compliance landscape, forcing Chief Data, Security, Compliance, and Legal Officers to stitch together solutions that don’t work together, expose infrastructure gaps, and are costly and complex to manage. A survey of US-based decision-makers showed that to meet their compliance and data-protection needs, almost 80 percent had purchased multiple products, and a majority had purchased three or more.¹ The result is increased operations costs, ineffective data governance, poor security outcomes, failed compliance audits, and damage to brand reputation. Additionally, as the threat landscape continues to evolve, the types of risks organizations face inevitably expand and extend well beyond the traditional cybersecurity risks. This means that risk roles within the organization are blurring, requiring a collaborative and cohesive approach across data, compliance, and risk officers, as each drives an integral part of an effective data strategy. We believe the new way to optimize your data strategy is to deliver a unified view of data in the organization across hybrid, multicloud environments by bringing together the business users of data with the protectors of data.

In the past, we have shared how Azure Purview and Microsoft 365 Compliance are used together to ensure consistent, automated application of sensitivity labels to data assets across the data estate to simplify how organizations understand their sensitive data.

Today, we are excited to introduce Microsoft Purview—a comprehensive set of solutions from Microsoft to help you govern, protect, and manage your entire data estate. By bringing together the former Azure Purview and the former Microsoft 365 Compliance portfolio under one brand and over time, a more unified platform, Microsoft Purview can help you understand and govern the data across your estate, safeguard that data wherever it lives, and improve your risk and compliance posture in a much simpler way than traditional solutions on the market today.

Microsoft Purview

• Helps you gain visibility into assets across your entire data estate.
• Leverages that visibility to manage end-to-end data risks and regulatory compliance.
• Governs, protects, and manages data in a new, more comprehensive, and simpler way. 

Customers of the Azure Purview portal can now use the Microsoft Purview governance portal. For customers of Microsoft 365 E5 or Microsoft E5 Compliance, check out the Microsoft Purview compliance portal to see what’s new!

Get started with Microsoft Purview today

• Watch a video introducing the new Microsoft Purview.
• Get started quickly and easily with a new Microsoft Purview account to try the Microsoft Purview Data Map and Microsoft Purview Data Catalog.

¹February 2022 survey of 200 US compliance decision-makers (n=100 599-999 employees, n=100 1000 plus employees) commissioned by Microsoft with MDC Research.