Microsoft Corp. has announced general availability for its Microsoft Purview Data Governance solution, and it has deployed new innovations to help business users manage the growing challenges associated with a vast data landscape.

“The approach that we’ve taken, and this is based on a lot of the customer feedback we received, is how do we empower the business user?” asked Rohan Kumar (pictured), corporate vice president of Azure Data at Microsoft. “When you look at somebody whose data is stored in the marketing domain or the finance domain…curate the data as they need, create the data products, serve the needs of generative AI usage for their domain within the enterprise without having to centralize all that work while maintaining the guardrails that are needed. That’s the essence of the big announcement that we are making around data governance today.”

Kumar spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and George Gilbert at the Supercloud 7: Get Ready for the Next Data Platform event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Microsoft Purview is helping enterprise customers solve key governance and security challenges in an AI-powered unified solution.

Using Microsoft Purview to identify key data systems

Microsoft has been fine tuning Purview since its transition in 2022 from a cloud-native data governance solution in Azure. In May, the company added Copilot capability to Microsoft Purview and a service that can scope Insider Risk Management policies and dynamically define user or group membership based on Entra ID attributes, such as location or department.

“We are working with a lot of our customers to understand the most important data systems where they want these policies enforced,” Kumar said. “You look at anyone with a reasonable amount of scale, they have multiple solutions that they have invested in.”

The Microsoft Purview Data Catalog is an enterprise repository to help data stewards and data owners curate assets. The solution enables visibility across data assets, providing insights into curated data, classification status and sensitivity labels.

“Having understanding of your entire data sets at the physical level…is an extremely daunting task,” Kumar said. “What are my servers, what are my databases, what are my tables? We basically have what we call a scanning infrastructure that has an understanding of each of these solutions and we are betting pretty heavily on open-source standards with things like Atlas from a consumption and production-based API.”

Microsoft Purview innovatively allows customers to define and organize data within business domains such as finance. It also links those assets to business objectives.

“For their business outcomes, what is it that they need?” Kumar asked. “Multiple data systems are going to exist. Our approach has essentially been the better the breadth of that data that we can capture to understand their estate, the better the comprehensive understanding for our customers.”

Supporting data security and governance

Microsoft Purview also reflects an interest in unifying data security with governance in a holistic solution. The company is seeking to help customers overcome blind spots in security caused by the use of multiple tools to govern data.

“Typically, policies associated with data started from the domain of security,” Kumar noted. “If this data has personally identifiable information associated with some of our customers, then only this security group can have access to it. In talking with a lot of customers they essentially want governance to be associated with policy as well. How those policies get implemented in a federated manner becomes very important.”

Microsoft has described its Purview Data Governance platform as “a solution for the era of AI.” The company has infused artificial intelligence at every layer of the experience to help automate manual tasks and accelerate data curation. Microsoft is focused on leveraging AI to build in security protocols as well, according to Kumar.

“The other thing that we are very heavily investing in is this notion of how to leverage AI to make governance itself better,” Kumar said. “Imagine a world where you’re using Microsoft Teams, as an example, and somebody shares a link to a Power BI report. ‘Somebody sent me this Power BI report…tell me about its lineage.’”

Looking toward the future, Kumar envisions the rise of AI agents, intelligent pieces of software programmed to perform specific tasks within the enterprise.

“More and more, just as the power of these models improves, we are looking at this notion of agents,” Kumar said. “There is a lot of reasoning, that typically humans do today, which we believe these models are capable of for simple scenariosor they’ll get smarter and smarter. For developers who are trying to build those agentic workflows, how do we ensure that the governance is able to meet their requirements and their scale? That, we believe, is a paradigm shift.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Supercloud 7: Get Ready for the Next Data Platform event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE