Microsoft Purview Data Governance Reviews

Microsoft Purview helps our business identify valuable information across various data types by using machine learning and customizable tags. It then allows users to export this data with PowerShell and combine it with metadata from other Microsoft products, facilitating both data analysis and migration processes.

While I haven't used Purview's cross-platform capabilities, I'm impressed by Microsoft's integration of its various solutions, including ComplianceOne and SharePoint, which cater to large enterprises. A deep dive into the functionality confirmed this positive impression.

The ability of Microsoft Purview to connect across devices, including Macs like mine, is a major benefit. While I was surprised to find PowerShell running smoothly on Mac, Purview itself has been user-friendly and avoided the issues I've read about online. This ease of use is crucial for me.

My previous projects focused on M365, but the next step is integrating Azure Virtual Machines into our solutions. In this context, Purview's ability to natively integrate compliance across both Azure Dynamics and Office 365 is crucial for ensuring our work scales effectively.

The biggest advantage of Purview is its ability to centralize data management. This multi-platform tool integrates data assets from across the company, providing a reliable and unified way to handle data procedures. This consistency, a hallmark of Microsoft products, is valuable for many users.

Designed for our regulated environment, Purview offers a variety of features that enable us to develop compliant solutions even when limitations seem to restrict what's achievable.

Purview has helped save us time through automation.

The most valuable aspect of Purview is its PowerShell connectivity, enabling automation. The content explorer helps visualize how classifiers, including custom-sensitive information types, identify content. Purview even allows testing these custom types with a dedicated button. Overall, PowerShell governance and export capabilities significantly improve our workflow by automating tasks and simplifying data extraction.

While Microsoft Purview addresses global regulations, it lacks out-of-the-box functionality. Extensive development is needed to define sensitive information types and train rectifiers for each customer. Most importantly, Purview currently lacks multi-language support, hindering its use in multilingual environments. Since communication compliance is the only exception, future updates should include sensitive information types and keywords in major languages, especially those relevant to the European Union. This would require customization efforts to create equivalents for these information types and keywords in other languages.

The rapid pace of feature changes in Purview, including marketing shifts, retirements, merges, and splits, creates challenges. Documentation struggles to keep up, leaving users behind. Further compounding this issue is the inconsistency of PowerShell modules. While some, like the SAP exporter, function well, others, like the trainable classifier's missing fetch module, significantly limit the usability of a potentially valuable feature. This lack of polish hinders automation efforts and makes data governance assessments more difficult.

Setting up Purview in a production tenant proved challenging due to a lack of clear documentation on permission requirements. While Purview offers role-based access with custom role creation, there's no built-in explanation of each role's function and associated permissions. Microsoft Learn documentation wasn't helpful either. Ideally, Purview should provide in-context information about each role within the portal, eliminating the need for cryptic names and extensive external research.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for under one year.

Microsoft Purview seems to be functioning, but there's a lack of clarity on how it analyzes data. The content explorer shows inconsistencies, with Microsoft acknowledging that the actual document count might differ from what's displayed. This suggests limitations in the current setup. While improvement is desirable, it's still a usable tool.

I submitted a support request in the test tenant, possibly specific to that environment. However, the Purview quality was lacking. Automatic replies didn't address my question, which seemed misplaced within the chosen topic. It felt like I contacted the wrong department. Instead of offering real support, they suggested I write a public blog post seeking help online. This was essentially non-existent support, potentially due to limited resources for test tenant users. It's unclear if this reflects the quality of support for the expensive enterprise licenses.

While deploying Purview itself was easy for me after I had spent significant time getting a Microsoft certification, onboarding junior colleagues who haven't had that preparation is proving more challenging. Despite their initial confusion, the overall structure and features of Purview seem well-organized and at least decent.

While a single person could deploy Purview in this instance because it's a test tenant, it's important to clarify that this ease of deployment applies only to the test environment and wouldn't be representative of the process for a production tenant.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Microsoft Purview is a subscription-based service, so we need either an E3 or E5 license to use it. The specific features we have access to within Purview depend on which of these licenses we have.

I would rate Microsoft Purview eight out of ten.

To choose the best Purview subscription for your needs, I recommend using a test tenant to explore Purview's features and value proposition. This will help you identify the most critical functionalities and choose the subscription that best aligns with your business requirements.

We migrated everything to the Azure cloud. Microsoft Purview was coming up at the time, and we also started looking into their other products such as Microsoft Power Platform, particularly Power BI. We wanted to see how these particular tools can go head to head and how they would be useful. This is when we started with Microsoft Purview. The POC itself took more than a year because it was not easy. The tool was growing. It took a long time to get their product support help to fix some of the issues and features. 

In the last year, we started using it for a few things. One is mainly data protection. We mainly targeted the scenarios where when someone is sending a document in an email or labeling a document as confidential, what the person receiving the document can do. 

We are trying to cover Microsoft 365-related products. We are trying to use it for the data discovery process. That is the end goal. Across the organization, we want people to be able to find the data easily. There is a kind of data marketplace, and we started to use it for data discovery.

Data discovery is one of the beautiful things of Microsoft Purview. We mostly have Microsoft products, so it has been helpful, but we are continuously growing. We are still in the learning stage with this product. We are trying to onboard only a small amount of data, and then we will see how we can curate the data so that it is meaningful. Slowly, and probably after a year, we will come to know how efficiently we are using Microsoft Purview as a part of the data discovery phase.

Microsoft Purview is a cloud-native app. So far, we have only used it with Windows with Chrome or Edge browser, and it works seamlessly. It is not a problem. We have not used it with other OSs, but it should work with them.

Microsoft Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world. Data classification is one of the beautiful features. It works seamlessly.

Microsoft Purview's natively integrated compliance across Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365 is perfect.

Microsoft Purview enables you to show your compliance in real time. There is the Insights dashboard, which is particularly for security officers. They can always go and have a look. If there are any compliance issues with the portal, they can always go and check anytime.

Microsoft Purview has helped to reduce the time to action on insider threats, but I do not have the metrics. We are in the discovery phase. After a year, we should be able to provide exact metrics. As of now, we just look into the issue and take action. It is helping to reduce the errors. In terms of percentage, there are about 20% savings.

Microsoft Purview will save us time and overall product delivery costs. Product data discovery should be easy, which will reduce the overall product delivery time. This is something that we are working on. There should be at least 10% savings on the project delivery time.

There are several features. Their data labeling or data classification is particularly valuable because we want to categorize all of our data into confidential, public, or internal. Microsoft Purview works seamlessly with the Microsoft product suite, including Office 365, to schematize the data assets, so data labeling and classification have been helpful.

Microsoft Purview can connect with all of our security-related things across Office 365. It easily connects with Microsoft Defender. The integration with Microsoft Defender is good.

It works well for schematized data assets for lineage tracking. Overall, it works well if someone is using mostly Microsoft products.

It is still growing. It does not meet all the requirements from the security point of view. It supports only a limited number of tools and technologies that pertain to Microsoft products. If you want to leverage other solutions such as Workday or Oracle Fusion, features will be coming up, but as of now, it is for the Microsoft suite. 

It is still growing as a data connector platform for supporting ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources, so not all the products are supported as of now. 

As a data catalog tool, it needs to have a connection with all the sources. This improvement is definitely needed because they are supporting only Microsoft-related products but not third-party products.

We started to explore Microsoft Purview when they launched it. It was the end of 2021.

It is a stable product, and continuous improvements are always coming in. After a year, it probably will be a complete tool for all sorts of uses. I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability.

It is unlimited. I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of scalability.

We currently have 10 to 20 people using the tool. It is deployed as part of information technology from the IT management, and we try to circulate it by onboarding various sets of users from various departments.

Last week, I raised an issue with technical support. It issue was a priority for us. Within a couple of hours, they got back. They were efficient with this particular product. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used some of the manual processes. We built a data catalog using Vast data services.

It is deployed on the cloud. The deployment time is much less, but because it is a data cataloging tool, curating the data takes time. Spinning of the environment and starting it can be done in a couple of hours.

It definitely requires maintenance from the data security and data scanning point of view.

We have a data governance team. 

It is cheap. It is based on consumption. If somebody wants to start using it, the price is definitely cheaper than a tool like Collibra.

I would definitely recommend Microsoft Purview. However, it is not good for data quality. If you are not looking for data quality and you only want a complete security and data cataloging tool, it is perfect.

It is still maturing. At this time, I would rate Microsoft Purview a six out of ten.

Our goal was to provide insights into the latest data entries, implement governance measures, identify and classify sensitive data, and address specific business use cases. The primary use cases revolved around establishing a comprehensive data lineage, accompanied by pertinent metadata. This was primarily aimed at providing a business-centric dashboard, enabling stakeholders to visualize how data moves from one point to another and ultimately reaches the target. 

In my experience, I've utilized it on Windows machines with Blackfish without encountering any issues.

The dashboard offers insights into the nature of the data, and the transformations occurring between different columns, and allows for traceability to identify any issues that may arise. These use cases have proven highly beneficial not only for business analysis but also for support activities. For instance, it aids support personnel in quickly identifying issues such as missing data or anomalies, streamlining the troubleshooting process for efficient problem resolution.

Purview facilitates data management across diverse cloud and platform environments, encompassing AWS and GCP. However, my experience has been exclusively with Azure. Given that my ecosystem operates within Azure, both the source and target activities are conducted seamlessly within the Azure framework. The integration is smooth since Microsoft Purview is inherently designed for Microsoft components, making it effortless to establish connections and retrieve the required data. I haven't employed it for other sources or alternative cloud systems.

The importance of Purview lies in its careful consideration of critical global regulations. As a data governance solution, it plays a crucial role in business development processes. Given the potentially sensitive nature of incoming data, proper classification is essential to ensure specialized treatment. This facilitates easy access for subsequent activities such as metadata modifications or updates, providing sufficient information for comprehension by business personnel. The tool proves beneficial for data quality officers, enabling them to monitor data and detect any discrepancies, empowering them to take necessary actions. In the realm of the cloud, Purview emerges as a highly valuable data governance solution.

The integration of Microsoft Purview has significantly reduced the need for multiple solutions to interact within our company. This reduction not only streamlines processes but also saves time. For example, when a problem arises, understanding, identifying, and resolving it becomes much easier compared to the traditional approach of tracing through multiple systems for the root cause. With Microsoft Purview, the identification process is simplified, leading to potential savings in support efforts. Business stakeholders also benefit by gaining more visibility into how data flows through the system and understanding the metadata information without relying heavily on support or technical personnel. This autonomy enhances their ability to assess and comprehend the situation independently.

I haven't implemented it to enhance response time for insider threats by applying security measures. However, the tool does provide visibility into the movement of data, allowing the data control officer to monitor and classify alarms promptly. In the event of an alert, appropriate actions can be taken accordingly.

Efforts have significantly diminished, and this reduction is directly proportional to cost savings. As a technical person involved in both solution development and support processes, I've observed a reduction of more than fifty percent. The turnaround time for issue resolution has notably decreased. Previously, it took others a considerable amount of time to identify the root cause, but with Microsoft Purview, pinpointing issues and finding solutions has become much more efficient.

It has had a significant impact on our capacity to maintain compliance. As a data governance solution, it offers features essential for ensuring that compliance requirements are thoroughly met, and data processing aligns with regulatory standards.

The user interface is highly intuitive and user-friendly.

I appreciate it because it provides a unified solution. Everything can be managed in one place, from scanning sources to making assets available. The access includes comprehensive metadata information, presented in a non-technical manner for easy comprehension of the asset's nature. The visualization it offers is quite clear. Additionally, it creates a lineage based on data processing, allowing for workflow authorization and control over metadata modifications or other activities. 

It caters to the entire micro-ecosystem, providing connectivity and seamless data flow. It allows for scanning, asset discovery, and data coverage. While there are some existing limitations, it's important to note that the tool is continuously evolving. I believe it holds great potential and will become an excellent resource for development in the future.

Purview's data connector platform is designed to facilitate ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources. I've personally applied this feature to one of our sources, an Oracle database. Specifically, we utilized ADA for data permissions and seamlessly integrated it with the Azure Data Factory pipeline. This automated the connection to Oracle, enabling the setup of data extraction and loading processes. Overall, it proved to be a valuable and effective feature.

Enhancing the tool's capability to connect to multiple sources would be valuable. Also, when data is transformed in other systems, the tool should capture the relevant metadata and generate lineage for those systems as well. Thirdly, addressing limitations, such as relying on Apache Atlas for mitigation, should be handled within the Microsoft tool itself rather than external dependencies like Apache Atlas.

I have been using it for approximately six months.

The stability is satisfactory, and I would give it a rating of eight out of ten.

I have utilized it in a cloud environment, and scalability is assured.

I am content with technical support, but for various inquiries, the responses often indicate that the feature is either not available or still in a previous state. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. Even individuals with less technical expertise can do it.

Deployment spanned a week and involved six different individuals.

Maintenance becomes necessary when leveraging external APIs and tools, especially concerning access management. However, once the initial setup using MS Purview is complete, ongoing maintenance is minimal. Automation takes over with continuous scanning, automatic data classification, and sensitivity labeling. Workflows can be established and utilized for an extended period, reducing the need for frequent maintenance.

I consider it cost-efficient because of the metrics it provides. With each scan being incremental, avoiding redundant scans of the same object, the tool offers a way to manage costs effectively.

We didn't extensively evaluate other options because Microsoft Purview successfully met the requirements for the specific tasks at hand. However, during implementation, I became aware of more mature tools available in the market that might offer greater capabilities. It seems that Microsoft Purview is still evolving compared to these more established alternatives.

In my scenario, I encountered difficulty connecting to a file system database, especially when it was located on a different server. Additionally, when working with an in-house solution like Azure Data Factory, while Microsoft Purview can successfully bring metrics to tables as assets, it faces limitations in identifying the leading use of those assets. For instance, a database solution handling ETL activities may not seamlessly provide insights into the transformations, sources, immediate obligations, and final targets associated with a specific asset, making it challenging to track its usage directly within Microsoft Purview.

I would strongly recommend Microsoft Purview when utilizing solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Data Factory, various applications, and databases.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten because several features are still in a preliminary state. Given that it is in preview, it may not be as stable or fully functional yet. Also, the absence of data quality and data profiling mechanisms contributes to this rating.

In both my previous and current organizations, I've worked with Microsoft Purview. While my previous company had a premium license for all services, my current one doesn't. At my previous company, I used Purview to design communication compliance policies, likely leveraging some pre-built policies from Microsoft security. Initially, we lacked a specific goal, but my exploration of the platform led me to pursue a cybersecurity certification to optimize its use. This helped me design DLP policies more effectively and implement signing for communication compliance policies. Recently, I discovered eDiscovery and its value for exporting large datasets for specific employees based on their protection level. Lastly, I found its activity tracking feature particularly useful for monitoring employee movements in our large, partially remote workforce of nearly 100 employees, with less than half in the main office. This tracking proved valuable for detecting potential data leaks during employee departures. I briefly explored Insight Risk Management during a one-month license trial.

Purview's multi-platform capabilities, supporting iOS, Mac, and Android, have been invaluable to me. As a beginner in device management software, the prospect of using another option with a large web portal felt daunting. Purview's ability to manage devices across different operating systems saved me significant time.

At my previous company, all internal data lived in Azure, but client data resided in Salesforce. This siloed structure made comprehensive data control impractical without a tool like Purview that seamlessly supports ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources.

Purview's natively integrated compliance across Azure Dynamics 365 and Office 365 is even stronger than its ability to integrate with third-party solutions.

It's crucial that Purview was built with critical regulations from around the world in mind, especially for those of us in the European Union where EU regulations apply. This is a key consideration for everyone involved in data governance. While some frameworks offer vast data capabilities, the sheer volume of work required for a medium-sized business to ensure compliance with regulations across all these frameworks would be insurmountable.

I initially found the DLP system overwhelming due to its capabilities exceeding the needs of our small organization, where I implemented simpler policies. However, it proved valuable for ensuring compliance with GDPR, and PCI DSS and provided visibility into sensitive data sharing.

Purview has saved our organization a huge amount of money and time.

Through Purview, we were able to streamline our technology stack by consolidating the number of solutions we relied on. This prompted us to re-evaluate our vendor landscape, ultimately leading us to migrate everything to Microsoft and leverage their comprehensive suite of tools. Surprisingly, most of the functionalities we previously paid for were already available within the Microsoft ecosystem. This simplified our IT infrastructure, transitioning us from a predominantly on-premises setup to a cloud-based one, with Microsoft solutions forming the core of our cloud environment.

Purview has improved my ability to stay on top of compliance.

The most valuable feature is the tracking activity and device onboarding.

I have some concerns about the separation of roles in Purview from the Microsoft tenant, as well as how they interact with the security portal and endpoint manager. Certain permission issues or protracted permission updates could arise due to suboptimal configuration, potentially extending the expected timeframe.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for two years.

Microsoft Purview is stable in protection but there are some bugs in the GUI.

Designed for enterprise-level organizations, Microsoft Purview scales effortlessly.

The initial deployment was straightforward. I was able to do the entire deployment with the help of one other person.

We used a Microsoft partner when we started working with the tenant before starting to use Purview.

While Purview's standard pricing might not be accessible to most small businesses, we were fortunate to benefit from the educational pricing which made it a financially viable option for our needs.

I would rate Microsoft Purview a nine out of ten.

Maintaining Purview is essential, as some internal problems, like endpoints disconnecting within the organization, can develop over time.

To fully leverage Microsoft Purview's capabilities, it is recommended that one first familiarize themselves with the organization's existing infrastructure.

Data loss prevention is a significant use case for us. I'm not on the security team, so I don't know exactly what kicked it off, but I believe we wanted Purview for the DLP capabilities first, and that led to us taking advantage of the other aspects of the solution. We have Azure, Purview, Defender, and all of the other Microsoft products. We're trying to leverage and use all of them. 

We have Intune for deployments and things like that. We're rolling out the zero-trust model right now. We use Jamf to manage our Macs because I'm not knowledgeable enough to Intune correctly, and it doesn't have the functionality that Jamf does. We can move over to Intune or whatever. So I think they're definitely trying to push me that way.

I don't know if I've gotten much value out of Purview personally, but our security team loves it. Our biggest concern is leakage or theft of our data because we have a lot of PII and stuff that has not been released. We like the insights Purview provides and the way the solution can track and manage things. I'd say that was probably their favorite piece of it so far. From everything the security team has told me, the policy management and DLP features are working spectacularly.

We have had some issues automating our document management with Power Apps. I haven't been super-disappointed with anything except for Power Apps, which kinda drives me nuts. I think it's because I am a coder who can do things properly, and I keep trying to do things there, but it's not working out the way. The security team is pretty quick. I'm kind of a thorn in their side. I always try to get around stuff. They haven't come to me for anything saying, "Hey, I can't find this information." They're pretty good. Maybe, there's a lack of documentation, but that doesn't seem to be an issue for our team. 

Another thing involves SharePoint. We have everything in SharePoint up on the cloud, and we want to ensure it's secure, so we have blocked all external access. You need to have one of our devices and our codes. But the C suite wasn't pleased because it was accessible externally for a while. And we have a penetration company that does testing. They were able to harass one of our users enough that they finally clicked the button that says "Approve this Login," so it just takes one time. 

They find red flags everywhere in organizations. The gut reaction was to cut off external access for now and figure out what we can do down the road after that, but this is a stopgap measure. However, the C suite told us that it wasn't good enough, but there was no way somebody outside could access our systems. You need to be on a trusted IP or our VPN. We have conditional access configured.  

We hired an actual outside consultant company to come in And I've been working with them for close to a year now. We're trying to leverage Purview and Power Apps to automate our document management. We have a ticket open with Microsoft because that's one more thing we're struggling with. It's supposed to go through and look for any PII data, like Social Security numbers, etc. We also have really low retention policies. For example, our emails are retained for only six months maximum. Team conversations are saved for two days. They're they're brutal. Legal discovery can be expensive, so they want to make sure we don't have anything to discover. 

I'm wondering if Purview can do some of the things that we're struggling with, and we're tripping over ourselves because the other thing we did was configure it so you have to be in a special group to even access those files. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Purview Information Protection has a labeling component. Still, I don't know how much it organizes labeled documents, and I think it also includes labeling after detecting user behavior that the system tracks.  They talked about something similar in one of the keynotes I recently listened to. I'm like, "Why are we not doing that?"  I'm looking at how we're just beating our heads against the wall. Even if we get this in place, it would still be very challenging. 

We like this In terms of usability and security. It will be difficult for our teams to do their jobs with all this other garbage in place. At this point, we've got it almost always set up, but it isn't working the way we need it to on the Power Apps side of things. 

And we've got a ticket open with the Power Apps team to figure out why it isn't working because it's supposed to be on a scheduled thing, but we've let it sit for weeks at a time, and nothing ever happens. It doesn't run. And there's no way to monitor. We don't know if it's doing anything, or we can look at our files to make sure that could be improved. 

We started using Purview in the last six months.

We are a new company. We broke off from a much larger organization three years ago, but we had about 3,000 people in the last organization, and we're down to 300. Before Purview, I don't think we had anything for DLP because there was so much to do. It was all hands on deck for about a year and a half where we were just trying to get that stuff done.

We have dev and production environments in AWS, and we're using native AWS tools to monitor the applications over there. I don't know how effective they are compared to Purview. We outsourced all of that to another company. The guy who owns it used to work with us.

I am not involved in purchasing. My company is willing to throw as much money as needed to be as secure as possible. Security is our priority, so we'd probably pay for it even if it was pretty expensive.

I rate Microsoft Purview eight out of 10. 

I'm an implementer and an integrator. In my last project, I used Purview for a government organization, so we primarily used it for data governance and data lineage. We haven't used it with Microsoft 365. It's a portal that takes data from SQL Server and the data lake. We mainly work on the data governance and security side. About 20 business analysts use Purview. The company has around 100 people in the department.

Microsoft Purview helps us manage data in various formats like Dynamic SQL. It performs two procedures. The primary function is to ingest the SQL database and modify the data type or column name. It also manages the data types and all the metadata related to the tables and columns. It puts everything in one place in the call view or the description pertaining to the business logic, plus the column-level descriptions.

It streamlines things by reducing the number of solutions that must interact with each other. When everything was done manually, each program maintained its own version of the Excel file. Now, it's in one central place, and I can go to Purview to manage the permissions.

By centralizing everything, Purview gives senior management greater visibility into their data. It also makes the data more accessible to non-technical people who need to access the data daily. It's easy for an admin to provide them access if they need to check something quickly. 

Purview checks compliance in real-time. It's helpful when we're meeting with regulators. We must follow European data regulations, so we must manage security and access. We need to show them a log of who had access, who gave it to them, and how many days they had access. That is all shown in Purview, plus other columns like the NHS identification numbers, etc. 

I rate Purview a six out of ten for its ability to help us stay on top of compliance. The product is still not mature enough. There are so many servers on Purview.

I like Purview's data discovery features. It automatically scans and identifies all the fields. In the last project, the customer required us to have some of the codes we specified in this, and we had to structure the codes in a specific way. We can define the structure. 

Previously, everything used Excel, so everyone had their own version of the same spreadsheet with different data, and they were managing it on SharePoint. That's why we moved it to Purview. 

Purview's privileged access manager helps us explore user access rights within the data lake. We use the data lineage and governance features. It can also explore secret data, but we still haven't implemented this feature. It has secure connectors for non-Microsoft sources, which is critical. We're bringing in files from storage. Purview connects to storage, scans it, and edits the required information. 

We've had a few issues with the scanner. It runs perfectly one day, and on another day, it will run the whole night. It's probably related to the rules. If I set some compliance rules and apply the rules to any column, I can't delete it. I have to disable it and reactivate it.

We have two instances. One is for everything, and the other is for the production environment. Sometimes there is a bug when the scan runs overnight. When we come in the next morning, it's still running, so we have to stop and restart it. This is costly.

I have used Purview for a year and a half. 

I rate Purview a six out of ten for stability. 

Purview is scalable. You can integrate it with on-premise solutions and third-party products. 

I rate Microsoft's support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Our client was using Informatica. We used Purview for this project because the client has everything on Azure. It's better to use Purview when you work on Azure. We compared Informatica's available features with Purview's, and the client decided to go with Purview because of all the services in Azure. Microsoft is constantly adding new features to Purview.

Deploying Purview is straightforward. We deployed manually by creating services in Azure. The initial setup took five or six months. After that, we spent some time setting up the scan rules and defining the structure. I deployed the solution along with three other people. We worked with one or two people from Microsoft during the deployment. We have an excellent relationship with Microsoft, and they're helpful when we have any questions. 

We've seen a return from using Purview because it's more accessible to high-level managers without technical knowledge. 

Purview's price is pretty high when you factor in storage costs. 

I rate Microsoft Purview a six out of ten. It's a good service if you only use Azure. If you have an on-prem environment or use another cloud provider, you can compare Purview to other solutions. 

I was working for a nonprofit here in Kansas called Children International. I was a global data engineering manager, and I was tasked specifically with developing a data governance program. And at the same time, that's right when Purview came out. So I spent a year in that realm. I've been very plugged into Purview ever since.

The main use is data governance. Now, not every firm is necessarily at that maturity level when it comes to understanding data as an asset. So, a lot of companies can use it just as a data dictionary, a business glossary, which is nice, but it doesn't give the entire picture of what Purview can actually do, and so, actually, there were a dozen of implementations of Purview that I have been a part of in the past. I've led as a consultant and an architect. I'd say maybe I have used twenty-five percent of every feature that it has to offer. I am still kind of catching up with the rest of the features.

Microsoft Purview breaks down barriers to sharing information, accessing data, understanding what a piece of data means, how it is defined, how it's interpreted, and then how the end user uses it. So, with Purview, when it's best used, and it is at its best when the end users are the ones that are very involved because they're the ones who are going to be using it. Its users can see the support, and it grows year over year, you know, a kind of revenue measure. I don't know how exactly this is created. Also, I don't know what fields it uses. I don't know exactly what this means. We have a different department in the company that may need this. So they feel the need to go out and then hop to Purview. So it definitely knocks down a lot of barriers. It eliminates a lot of needless communication between different departments, and it just centralizes all information about an organization's data assets.

Speaking of the valuable features, I would speak on behalf of my clients, considering how it seemed when it was implemented. So, the sensitivity labels are big. The insights are also very nice as it gives the visual representation of being able to look at what or how the data storage is performing, especially monitoring if they are tagging technical assets or if they are adding business glossary terms. So, that's big, along with the basic features of Microsoft Purview. I'd say the last one that is very big with most clients is data lineage and being able to integrate that end-to-end flow component kind of so they can see that this is data from a Power BI dataset, and then they can follow where that dataset is coming from like it's from a SQL query in a Power BI report itself and data coming from a SQL Server, etcetera, etcetera.

The out-of-the-box connectors and being able to connect to third-party apps and data storage were some of the areas where they started off strong, but that's something that I think needs to continuously be at the forefront of the developers and the engineers for Purview to make sure that it is constantly up to date and can talk with any data source that it may need within a data state. So I would say that's not necessarily a con, but it's a possible weak point that could be strengthened.

I've been implementing Microsoft Purview with my clients for three and a half years. I'm a consultant for a Microsoft partner.

I think Purview, in terms of its stability, a lot of people think Purview itself is for data governance. Whereas data governance is something that is more like how we now view, let's say, Toyota six sigma or Agile, where it's kind of embedded in an organization and kind of culturally and throughout the work that's being done, it's kind of embedded in the network. I think Purview is kind of the same way. So, data governance operates in the same way. It first needs to be adopted and agreed upon by those that will be using it. Purview is the tool, and that's, like, the actual interface, and that's the actual, you know, that's the tool that allows it to be done. But in terms of stability, I think Purview does as good a job as it can of providing a foundation to make stability with data governance as easy as possible for those that manage it, but it does come down to those that are in charge of Purview itself to make sure that it stays stable. Well, I won't just say stable. I'll say that it is as stable as the data governance maturity that exists within an organization. It can't be more stable than that.

Scalability is fantastic considering their pricing since it addresses their pricing where it can have your incremental scans, which can cut down on your computing costs. That's great for scalability. So, if you have more data and you need to scan more and more, you don't need to scan the exact same data again and again and again. You may be okay only scanning the entire database maybe once a week, and then, let's say daily, you have incremental refreshers that help very much, or that help a lot with scalability. I think as more an organization scales and the more that it uses Purview with that scaling, the more you can get out of it, and the more it'll end up helping the organization, the more the stewards that are in their tagging things, the more that data is suggested, and that triggers are set up for ingestion runs. The more it scales, the better it is.

I have spoken with Purview's product team consisting of engineers who created Purview that writes the documentation that will work on bugs hands-on. Also, I've been a part of a lot of conversations, and I provided a lot of feedback in terms of improving Purview itself as a product and how we use it with our clients. So, there's been a lot of collaboration on that.

Considering Purview, I rate technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

There was not one solution. There were multiple solutions like Profisee involved. We also had Atlas and kind of a lot of commingling of those two and kind of piecemeal together solutions between a lot of those to do a Purview does. So not a whole lot, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

The deployment of the solution was done on Azure. A majority of our deployments for our clients are through a private cloud, and they're locked down with private DNS zones and custom DNS records on the back end if they're on their own servers and private endpoints as well. So fairly locked down, especially with where we talked about a lot of the data being sensitive and a need for it to be protected and monitored. Well, if data needs to be protected and monitored, then it likely is going to be needing something to be secure. So it's all been on a private cloud so far.

I was involved in the initial deployment of Purview. The initial deployments were actually straightforward because we were figuring out about the features, and found that it was a little less feature-rich, so there was less of a question. And it hasn't given us the time to figure out where it works well or where it doesn't work well, and if we need to bring in consultants or can we do this in-house. As Microsoft Purview got a little more mature, the deployments got a little more complex, as we were kind of seeing that there are a lot of ways, like there were a hundred ways to do one thing or less. I think that applies to anything in software. But it applies to Purview as well and where we control access to a given data source while figuring out if we should use the policies and governance features within Purview. We also thought if we should do it in Azure portal using RBAC or should it be elsewhere. So I think we passed that part, and then now we're going to get back to some smooth deployments, and a lot of them will be templatized, you know, whether it be in ARM templates or Bicep like Terraform. Overall, at first, the setup process was fairly smooth to moderate.

I have not been able to conduct any actual ROI analysis on Purview just because it is hard to measure those kinds of intangibles of how those results show up. But they absolutely show up if we consider data to be an asset. Also then, it can also be a liability, just like something that would be like a can of soup on the shelf in a restaurant. That's an asset as it exists then, but also there can be hazards. So, if it's a large pallet, it could fall and cause damage. So, data cost would be a liability. I think that it is not something that currently appears on the balance sheet and can be cut to draw that line, but I think it'll be made much clearer in the near future, especially as we've become more and more data-saturated and we'll be more conscious of the value of data. Regarding ROI, I have not done any analysis in that realm, but I have full confidence that there are real ROIs that do exist and that will show up one way or another in the future.

Price-wise, I think it's very generous and accessible to not just enterprises but small to medium-sized companies as well. I think it's very fair in terms of how they break apart the storage and the actual computing, and that makes it very accessible. So, that is a very big plus for Purview. I think a lot of clients and organizations would feel that way as well.

On the time front, I can absolutely speak about the cost of the solution since time is money. Saving analysts or developers, or engineers time can add or translate into actual savings if you can do the right calculation. But just to stick on that time front, I've seen it cut down, let's say, a given team, or a data governance team, I'd say, in a reduction of fifty to sixty percent of the time that would be spent answering maybe questions for other parts of the business about what a certain data means or where this data lives, they can just point them into certain directions, and they can point them to Purview and have those answers or have or have this questions answered. So that's a big part. And then also being able to have those ties from the business to IT and being able to bridge that gap and being able to have a technical asset ingested from the data side or, from the technical side, and then being able to get the business to interact with that as well. I would say that total savings in terms of on a team-to-team basis, I could see anywhere from fifty to seventy-five percent reduction in time spent on those activities just by having Purview.

After looking through other options, we decided for our clients that in these situations where they're already in a Microsoft data environment in terms of their data, whether it's living in Azure or on-prem, but the analytics that they're doing, whether it be with Power BI, with Synapse and Data Factory, it integrated so well.

Speaking about the importance that Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments, including AWS and Google Cloud Platform, I would say that it's very important, and I am going to lean on the side of this that has to do with data protection in terms of international data protection and various laws that kind of force data to stay in certain places. For example, I have one of my clients, which is a Fortune 100 company, and they have three different main regions around the world, including Asia Pacific, the EU, and the US. They had a lot of financial data that were in these three regions, but they couldn't cross each other even though it was the same data that was being used in the same applications, but it was difficult due to various barriers and regulations for the actual data control. Hence, they couldn't pass between each other. So that was kind of an issue. We had to actually go and deploy multiple instances of Purview. We had a dev and a prod instance in these three regions. That was definitely very important, and that was because of not only regulations but because of their desire to keep their data private, secure, and kind of locked down.

Speaking of how important it is for me that Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices and data in other SaaS apps, it is not very important as it's typically with legacy databases and data warehouses.

Regarding Purview's data connector platform for supporting ingestion from non-Microsoft data sources, I think it's very robust, and out of the gate, they included a data connector that you can plug in straight to Amazon and SAP. I believe now that they have some connectors for Salesforce and things like that and Snowflake. So they are absolutely staying right on or ahead of the curve when it comes to making this kind of making sure that the interoperability between other vendors as well is taken into account, which is awesome.

Speaking of how important is Purview's natively integrated compliance across Azure Dynamics and Office, I think it's very important, and it does it very well. I mean, literally without a problem. It's completely seamless, and so it does that perfectly.

Speaking of how important it is to me that Purview was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world, I think that it is very important. So, that's what kind of gave birth to the original classifications for 200 or so out-of-the-box classifications for a lot of data for possible credit card numbers, passport data, and ZIP codes in different countries. They were definitely aware of that, and you could tell from their design process they keep updating those. And so that was definitely built with that in mind for sure.

I have never used Purview for data loss protection. Typically, in these solutions, when we're deploying Purview, they're usually at a stage in their data platform maturity where they already kind of have that taken care of elsewhere.

Speaking of whether Purview helped reduce the number of solutions I need to interact with, I would say that I don't think so because I think data governance exists kind of outside the solution's architecture for these kinds of things. So, I'll say no, but that's not in a bad way. It's just not its job, in my opinion.

In terms of Purview's visibility, I think visibility is the most significant part since that's kind of what it does as long as it's set up correctly and maintained by the data stewards and the business experts. The domain experts that actually know how to interpret these business glossary terms and can link them to data assets, then it is the most useful tool out there.

I haven't used Microsoft Purview's automation. However, I have used Purview's AI since we have had a few situations. While not many organizations have had to do this, we had two instances of Purview in a given tenant, which would be dev and prod. So, we would use some APIs and some Purview CLI. We automated a lot of those processes. Also, it's workflow automation in terms of approvals and sign-offs from a given definition being changed or a term being added and being able to send that to the right people, especially by sending an email to the right group for approval. So the automation piece is huge. I have not yet been a part of, or I have not, used any of the AI-related features.

Speaking of how automation affected my speed and accuracy of risk detection, I would say it went very well, especially when dealing with financial data or when dealing with possible credit card data, personal information, and health data. In PII or PHI, being able to have those classifications kind of flag that data if it comes through, and then being able to mask it or identify those is something huge. So, that's probably one of my favorite features considering how it's integrated into the various protection services that Microsoft and Azure have to offer.

Speaking of how automation affected the quality of the insights I have, I would say it has more to do with speed on that front. Also, it's going to be as good as the developers, data stewards, and experts working on it. As you know, it'll be as good as the effort that they put in to constantly go through and curate or update a certain classification, including what the threshold may be to make sure it's catching all of where it needs to cache for risk detection or risk mitigation. And there's definitely a one-to-one relationship that is a very linear relationship. So the more end users and stewards are involved, the more you get out of it in terms of every feature that it has to offer.

Regarding Purview enabling me to show my compliance in real-time, I would say that I believe that there are some integrations that I have not personally, which I think came out in Purview the last time when I was very heavily involved with Purview, which is maybe four or five months back. So, I have not used those yet. But in terms of real-time, I don't think we have used it yet. But I'm sure we'll do that eventually.

Regarding whether Purview helped to reduce the time to action needed for insider threats, I would say it has, especially in the context of early detection for possible sensitive data, like health data, credit card information, and things like that, and being able to alert the right parties. So, they can make decisions on whether they need a mask or not or if there was a problem with the actual data source, whether the data kind of slipped through, and if it should have been taken out. So, definitely, it works in that kind of early detection there and in terms of the speed of making those decisions.

I would say that Purview has helped save time and money for my clients. So, it's definitely a long road for data governance, and a lot of the benefits aren't necessarily very tangible, so they might not show up on the balance sheet. However, data is an asset and needs to be treated as such. Hence, those who implement these data governance programs and who use Purview to do that are absolutely gonna be ahead of the curve, and we'll save countless dollars and time. I mean, the savings start immediately. So, down the road is when you really see those effects come up.

I would agree that Purview has affected my ability to stay on top of compliance.

Regarding others who are looking into evaluating the solution, I think they should prepare by making sure that the individuals or the teams that internally exist that are in charge of or that have a very large say, and how data governance is or functions within that organization, they need to be on board and they need to be willing to kind of to go through the motions and be okay with having an iterative process once Purview is deployed. It's not all going to be solved on day one, and they're not going to have everything that they need right away. Again, it's a tool that their data storage and domain experts can use, I would say.

As I am trying to be as unbiased as possible, I would suggest those planning to use the solution contact Microsoft since there are a lot of financial incentives and reimbursements, and discounts that exist right now, also in the past, and in the future, I would assume that for Purview's demos and PoC engagements. So, trying to find or just having the first part, which is the internal understanding of what data governance is and what they want out of it, while the second part is Microsoft does very well by tucking in partners that can show them ropes.

Since there were some features recently that maybe I haven't been able to test, I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case of Microsoft Purview is data discovery and scanning data sources.

Microsoft Purview is a cloud-based service on Azure, but the way it scans data sources is hybrid. While Purview itself resides in the cloud, some on-premises servers called integration runtimes are deployed within Purview to scan specific data sources. These on-premises servers are essential for making those sources accessible to Purview for further management and governance. In essence, Purview leverages a hybrid approach for data source scanning, but everything else about the service operates entirely in the cloud.

Microsoft Purview's data connector platform for handling non-Microsoft data sources effectively addresses our data ingestion requirements.

Purview affects the visibility we have into our estate. It is the primary reason why we use the solution.

While Microsoft Purview doesn't directly provide revenue, it saves our business money by improving efficiency. Imagine we're launching a marketing campaign and need customer or product data. Before Purview, we'd have to search for existing reports, unsure if they even exist. Now, Purview lets us see all reports, who created them, and when they were updated. This saves us time by eliminating manual data searches, ultimately reducing costs because people's time is valuable.

Purview's greatest benefit for us is data discovery. Even someone unfamiliar with our data can use Purview's basic keyword search to find relevant data sources. Purview then reveals details like data points, who maintains the source, update frequency, record and data point counts, columns, and data types – all this metadata is instantly available, making Purview our primary tool for data discovery.

While Microsoft Purview currently allows weekly scans for data sources, this limitation hinders the usefulness of the tool for frequently changing data. Ideally, Purview should offer daily scan frequencies to better accommodate these dynamic environments.

Microsoft should provide full access to log details, particularly those related to technical aspects of data source integration. Hiding information from technical users assumes a lack of understanding on their part, which isn't the case. While Microsoft claims Purview is under constant development and some features lack documentation, this shouldn't prevent transparency, especially for established functionalities we rely on.

I have been using Microsoft Purview for nearly one year.

Microsoft Purview is stable.

Microsoft Purview meets our scaling needs.

The error codes displayed by the user interface weren't detailed enough to diagnose a problem we had, so we contacted technical support for help. Even with some internal information, we couldn't properly debug the issue. Microsoft then examined their internal logs to provide more details about the error message, which was all we needed. Once we saw the additional log information, we were able to pinpoint the exact problem and fix it.

Neutral

Since Purview is an Azure service, enabling it for our company was simple for IT. Once activated, I became the collection admin, and data admin, and assumed all the associated Purview roles. Setting up the first data scan for our reports and data sources was surprisingly easy, even without any prior experience, though being technical helped! The process is entirely point-and-click with no coding required.

The week-long deployment involved collaboration with our IT network team to handle resources behind corporate firewalls, while I managed the remaining tasks, bringing the total number involved to three.

While we evaluated various data discovery and analytics solutions, particularly open-source options, we ultimately chose Microsoft Purview due to its seamless integration with our existing Azure Stack environment. Since Purview was already included in some of our corporate Microsoft agreements, it offered a cost-effective and user-friendly starting point for our data discovery needs.

I would rate Microsoft Purview eight out of ten.

While our data platform handles governance and privacy, we use Microsoft Purview specifically for data discovery. It helps us scan existing governed data sources and make them discoverable through various methods like keyword search, research tools, and browsing by data source. Notably, Purview provides valuable metadata, even though we don't currently leverage its compliance features.

No maintenance is required on our end.

Before considering Microsoft Purview, identify your specific data governance needs. Purview is a comprehensive solution, so pinpoint the features you require (data discovery, classification, sharing, etc.) and how they address your challenges. If you only need a few functionalities and paying extra for unused features isn't ideal, a simpler solution might suffice. However, if you plan to leverage Purview's full potential and the cost aligns with your budget, then I would recommend Purview.