Data Security, Compliance, and Governance
Data governance and security are top-level concerns for nearly every enterprise, made more critical by the exponential growth of data across nearly every aspect of the organization. This growing data volume, alongside increasingly stringent regulatory requirements, makes it essential for organizations to adopt comprehensive and user-friendly governance solutions.
To address these needs, Microsoft unveiled a series of powerful new updates to its Fabric platform that significantly enhance its data governance and security capabilities. The updates include a deeper integration with Microsoft Purview that provide new AI-driven tools to better manage, protect, and govern vast data estates.
The update includes new granular data management tools that give users new advanced tagging and domain controls, as well as expanded security features that make enhanced data loss prevention and sensitivity labeling available across Fabric and Microsoft 365 environments.
Granular Data Management: Better Tagging and Domain Control
One of the most significant updates to Purview is the introduction of granular data management capabilities, including new item tagging and enhanced domain controls. The ability to apply metadata tags to data assets across Microsoft Fabric enables better organization, searchability, and accessibility; tagging provides context for the data, essential for managing large and often unwieldy data estates.
Microsoft also introduced new enhanced domain management tools that puts more fine-tuned control in the hands of business owners. Features like default sensitivity labels and domain-level sharing settings allow the enforcement of data governance policies at scale.
A Unified Governance Solution
Nearly every enterprise has a data estate spanning multiple clouds, on-prem deployments, and SaaS environments. Microsoft announced a deeper integration between Purview and Fabric that brings together compliance and governance across all these boundaries.
The new unified experience extends beyond Purview and Fabric, extending to Microsoft 365. The existing integration between Microsoft 365 and Fabric allow Microsoft 365 to also take advantage of Purview’s new information protection capabilities.
For example, Purview allows businesses to apply Microsoft 365 sensitivity labels to Fabric items, just as they would to documents or emails in Microsoft 365. This allows security administrators to define who has access to specific data based on sensitivity, ensuring that confidential information is protected and only accessible to authorized personnel.
Purview also extends Microsoft 365 DLP policies to Fabric, enabling administrators to detect and prevent sensitive data (such as personally identifiable information) from being improperly shared or uploaded. If a user attempts to upload sensitive data to a Fabric lakehouse, the DLP policy can trigger alerts and audits and provide users with guidance to resolve issues themselves.
This high-level of integration ensures a unified approach to data governance and security across an organization’s entire data estate, covering both operational data within Fabric and user-generated content within Microsoft 365. It’s a powerful set of capabilities and a strong competitive differentiator for Microsoft.
Analyst’s Take: Why This Matters for Enterprise
The increased need for data governance and compliance capabilities is driven by two major factors: AI transformation and regulation. Microsoft addresses both with the combination of Fabric and Purview.
AI transformation is powered by data, with its success directly proportional to the quality of the data used by the applications. And for companies operating in industries with heavy regulatory oversight—such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing—governance and security features are not optional.
Ahead of the launch, I spoke with Arun Ulag, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Azure Data who oversees Purview development. Ulag explained that Microsoft views governance and protection as “an end-to-end job.” The challenge is that data is increasingly spread across applications and cloud boundaries.
Microsoft isn’t alone in this market. AWS has tools like its Glue Data Catalog and Macie solutions, while Google Cloud offers customers its Google Data Catalog and Google Cloud DLP solutions. Competing solutions from companies like Collibra, Informatica, and OneTrust also exist. What differentiates Microsoft is that it approaches the problem with a set of deeply integrated solutions, including Microsoft 365, that protect data no matter where that data exists.
Whether or not an enterprise invests in Microsoft Purview, they should invest in some level of governance capabilities. It’s the job of IT organizations to safeguard existing data while laying a foundation for the forward-looking challenges that will arise from increased regulation and the use of sensitive enterprise data within AI workflows. Tools like Purview do just that.
Microsoft delivers a compelling option with Purview. Its advanced tagging, domain management, robust security features, along with the integration with Microsoft 365 and Fabric, provides a comprehensive, scalable solution for managing data across the entire data estate–precisely what’s needed for businesses looking to improve their governance and security capabilities.
Disclosure: Steve McDowell is an industry analyst, and NAND Research is an industry analyst firm, that engages in, or has engaged in, research, analysis and advisory services with many technology companies; the author has provided paid services to Microsoft in the past and may again in the future. No company mentioned was involved in the drafting or publication of this article. Mr. McDowell does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned.
