A modern company needs more and more information to stay competitive. This has been known for a long time, and the market offers many solutions for data integration, processing and reporting. Only a few companies have reached the ideal target. Microsoft Purview and ADA offer new ways to do this.
The best practice in information management is often to focus the task to one internal organization. The result is thus qualitatively better and more manageable, but rarely satisfies all the organization’s information utilization needs.
Modern software has made data processing significantly easier. This has led in many companies in creating various permanent or temporary point solutions for the utilization of information around the organization. Actors and methods of operations can vary, but the responsibility and understanding of the implementation often stays within a single person. In the worst-case scenario, this person doesn’t even work for the company anymore. All this easily leads to the fact that when the information is finally used, it is unclear where it came from, how it was processed or when it was updated.
Microsoft Purview facilitates information management
Microsoft Purview is a data catalog service that aims to respond to the described problems. The service facilitates e.g., categorization of data, describing data flows, sharing of data safely, and finding all data related information easily.
Purview Data Map key functionality is to automatically find metadata, classifications and data flows of data stored on different platforms. There are more than 100 ready-made classifications, and you can also create your own customized categories. Categories include, for example, a person’s name and address, or a credit card or passport number. Classifications can be used to identify, for example, sensitive data fields, such as GDPR applicable data. Supported sources are e.g., Azure Blob storage and Datalake, SQL Server, Power BI, SAP (BW, ECC, HANA), Teradata, Oracle, AWS S3 – and dozens of others. The list is constantly growing, and you can find the current situation here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/purview/microsoft-purview-connector-overview
Purview Data Catalog offers an efficient way to search for information from existing data assets and maintain data classification and ownership of data assets by assigning Data Stewardship and Data Expert roles. In addition, the functionality can be used to maintain a glossary with dependencies and ownership information, and browse data flows as well as related data repositories and integrations.
Data Estate Insights enables a top-level view of data asset statuses. It tells, for example, how much sensitive information there is, where the information is located and what degree of data have ownership defined.
In addition, the Purview service offers an open REST interface for application integrations. It can be used to modify the user interface, the metadata of data sets and data flow descriptions via an Atlas 2.2 compatible interface.
Qivada ADA automates data management processes
ADA is a fully SAAS-based data management process automation service that only needs a browser to use. Various information management routines can be easily defined using the service. The implementation is generated inside the customer’s own Azure subscription – so the customer is not locked into the ADA service provider. In addition, ADA includes functionality for data lifecycle management, such as workflow management and data maintenance. You can read more about ADA’s services here: https://www.qivada.com/product/
Automatic identification of data flows is challenging because data can be integrated and transformed in many ways. For integrations made inside the ADA service, ADA can generate detailed data flows directly into the Purview service. And it is not only one-time generation, because the generation of data flow information into Purview can also be scheduled, so that all new developed data flows are automatically displayed in the Purview service.
An example picture of the data flow generated with ADA.
Check out the Purview starter pack (https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/consulting-services/enfooy.purview_kickstart) and ADA (http://www.qivada.com/product) to get easily started in managing your own data.
Author Tero Tiensuu is a Qivada partner and is responsible for the development of ADA. He has more than 20 years of experience in information management using modern tools,
