In today’s data-driven world, effective governance is crucial for managing vast volumes of information while ensuring security and compliance. Microsoft Purview promises a robust solution to modern data governance challenges, offering seamless integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem. As businesses increasingly rely on data to drive decision-making, tools like Purview help streamline data cataloguing, classification, and protection.
But is it the right fit for your organisation? In this blog, we explore Purview’s features, deployment, and pricing, helping you determine if it can meet your data governance needs while ensuring compliance and scalability.
How Do You Govern Your Data?
Most organisations are exploding with data that has been collected, transformed, and reported on with the business requirement to improve decision making. However, this huge increase in the volume of data has come with a lack of accurate tracking which all too often hampers the actionable insights that the business stakeholders demand. As organisations become more data-driven, Oakland has seen a growth in 4 particular pains which have been increasing for the last few years:
- How can we audit all this data to protect against data leaks and unexpected data loss which is especially crucial with the regulatory requirements of many organisations?
- How can data users discover data and derive business value in an environment that changes constantly?
- How can data consumers understand what the data collected means and turn this into business value?
- How can we show the current data quality of key datasets?
Plus, in a modern business environment, you may need on-premises and multi-cloud data governance solution which also easily integrates with your office 365 workloads.
Data Governance tooling can help mitigate these problems, and help with data management however, these tools are often complex to integrate to your entire data estate due to requiring:
- The ability to scan a large variety of data sources.
- A highly customised user interface.
- A powerful search engine to find data assets by many different types of metadata attributes.
- Technical experience to setup a Catalog, and Data Stewards with experience on maintaining a Catalog.
These are just a few of the main requirements that create a software marketplace full of products that are often expensive and hard to implement and maintain which is why these are often not business friendly and/or very expensive.
These products also need to ingest large amounts of sensitive data to meet user requirements, ironically creating a data governance concern in itself!
Microsoft Purview aims to ease the pain of data governance by being feature-rich, easy to deploy, maintain and secure. But is it worth the cost, and can it compete with bespoke data governance companies that have a head start measured in years or even decades?
What Are the Features of Microsoft Purview?
Microsoft Purview has recently gone through a major new update which adds lots of features, so if you’ve dismissed Microsoft Purview before, we recommend looking again.
- It’s connectors are very Microsoft-focused but cover most of its ecosystem: Azure, SQL Server, Power BI, and Office 365. If you’ve already bought heavily into Microsoft, you can scan most or all your data assets automatically.
- It focuses less on connectors made by other companies but still covers many popular data products like SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, GCP Big Query, AWS S3, and Snowflake.
- You can create and streamline business domains like sales, marketing, HR and supply chain, to help move data governance closer to the business
- Data classification becomes more business friendly as you can classify data with 200+ pre-built classifications, as well as custom classifications.
- The pre-built data governance compliance reports enable you to quickly check insights such as the percentage of data that has a data owner and the percentage of new data assets in the last month.
- API and Python SDK enable you to create custom data sources where connectors don’t exist or mass updating existing scanned data assets.
- Data quality is always a key issue Microsoft Purview has pre-defined and custom data quality tests.
- Data Sharing allows users to give other users read-only data lake data access without having to copy data.
- Data Governance can integrate with Master Data Management tooling like Profisee
- AI powered with lots of integration with Microsoft Copilot to generate data documentation and data quality tests.
How Do You Deploy Microsoft Purview?
- Oakland has designed and built many data platforms, and we highly value any product that can be deployed quickly, has low maintenance, and will meet stringent client IT & security requirements. We believe Microsoft Purview is stronger than most data governance products when it comes to data protection.
- It is as easy to deploy and maintain in Azure as any SaaS data governance product but also offers a choice – 20 plus regions to deploy into, including the UK.
- Microsoft Purview can also keep all traffic in and out of its server on its private network using Private Endpoints, never touching the public internet, offering an extra layer of data security when creating a Data Catalog.
- Scan Azure data via Managed Identity authentication which offers high-security data connections without worrying about managing passwords.
- It can connect directly to scan on-premises and other public cloud data assets (for example, AWS and GCP), though it requires some technical knowledge to setup the networking.
How Much Does Microsoft Purview Cost?
Automated data governance tooling is expensive, with costs starting in the thousands of pounds for most products. Microsoft Purview arguably starts at a lower base: we’ve found it starts at about £250 per month. However, you will also be charged on top of the base cost for scanning data, which goes up the more data consumed.
Due to the pricing being highly variable in Microsoft Purview we recommend building a proof of concept to road-test Microsoft Purview for a month or so to accurately measure costs.
What Are The Alternatives to Microsoft Purview?
Note this isn’t a comprehensive list and is a quickly evolving space with new exciting start-ups, and apps entering all the time, but we hope it will help you make an informed decision.
- Build your own: Building your own data governance tool offers complete customisation to your business’s unique needs, allowing you to tailor features and integrate seamlessly with existing systems. It gives you full control over security and privacy, ensuring sensitive data stays in-house, and avoids costly vendor licensing fees, providing better long-term ROI. You also avoid vendor lock-in, giving you the flexibility to evolve your tool as your governance requirements change.
While developing a custom tool requires a significant upfront investment, it fosters internal expertise and provides faster iteration when compliance needs or data regulations shift. By owning the solution, your organisation gains greater agility and control, avoiding reliance on third-party support or updates.
- Excel: low cost, low maintenance if data structures don’t update regularly, doesn’t require any specialist skills to build. While we suspect this is the most common type of data catalog used, we feel nervous about doing a data catalog in a data tool infamous for having poor data governance. It does not scale and requires lots of manual effort for any major changes to the organisation, creating data lineages and classification of sensitive data.
- Automate your own solution by extracting schemas of databases and files. This is a nice quick way of generating a data catalog with low maintenance and little extra costs. You can also build a dashboard on top of the business intelligence (BI) platform of your choice. It requires minimum effort if the number of data assets is small. Although adding features like data lineage and classifying data sensitivity will require a reasonable amount of engineering effort, which makes buying off the shelf products more appealing.
- You can combine this with a SharePoint Site to collect business information like Business Domains to make sure it is not just an IT exercise.
- Databricks Unity Catalog – ideal for Databricks heavy data platforms, as it is a free extra. Though it will only scan what Databricks can scan. You can integrate with other data governance products, including Microsoft Purview, and update schema as they update in real time.
- Mature products like Informatica and Talend. These tend to charge by the user and are more commonly found on-premise (though they can be configured and maintained in the cloud on Virtual Machines). They will likely cost the most; sometimes, this is significant, but these are feature rich, well-trusted and reliable.
- New(er) products like Atlan and Immuta often focus on providing data governance to more recent cloud data tooling like Databricks and Snowflake but also often focus on making deployments into the cloud more accessible by offering deployments via Docker or Kubernetes.
- Immuta also provides a single pane of glass for fine-grain data access across many popular data products that allows data access controls at a column and row level.
- Open Source software like Datahub and Amundsen, both built by large tech companies (LinkedIn and Lfyt respectively). These are the go solutions if your organisation has the technical capacity to build and maintain complex workflows. They offer a lot of customisations and the possibility of no licence costs, so they can be much cheaper at scale and be more custom tailored to fit an organisation’s data governance needs.
If you would like to see more tooling options and deep dive into how to select the right data governance tool to streamline your governance practices check out our data governance tooling guide.
Why Should You Choose Microsoft Purview?
In an increasingly busy data governance market, Azure Purview is a serious option to consider especially considering the new update which fills in some major gaps in its features.
If you are looking for a data governance product that is easy to deploy, secure, catalogue, and classify data assets, and provides some customisation through APIs and user interface at a competitive cost, then we think Microsoft Purview is a good contender.
However, and there is always a but, we do want to end on a cautionary note: we have found Microsoft Purview or indeed any other data catalog implementation fails more often because of either:
a) Lack of data governance processes and people.
b) Not knowing what business problems, you are exactly trying to solve.
Rather than choosing the wrong tool. This is because data catalog requires constant maintenance to keep up with the evolving nature of any organisation, so needs to show a high level of return of investment and have the right processes and people to maintain it efficiently.
Also remember to make sure that you select a tool based on the problems you have and how the tool can help you solve them and keep reviewing how it does can could add value. If you would like to know more about how we help clients with data governance while achieving a quick return on investment, download our data governance guide.
