Microsoft Purview pros and cons

Instead of having to manually write down which tables and columns exist and then describe them, you can do that process in one go, by simply connecting to a source. That's a huge time-saver and a great benefit of Purview.

The data classification part of the solution is excellent, especially as it gives us an insight into our sensitive data within Microsoft 365.

The cataloging tool is definitely the most valuable... It tells you about all the data you have in your tables, which helps people understand our data. We now know what data we have.

It has notable features for maximizing the value of your data. The data discovery and the data analytics parts are great both on-premises and on-cloud.

It is critical that Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments. That is the number one reason that people are adopting hybrid and best-of-the-breed approaches. Especially in banking, it is critical because people want to protect, govern, and secure their data. This is one of the first conversations that happens with security and the architecture group on the client side.

It's certainly easy to work with all Microsoft data sources like SQL Server, Synapse, and data lakes, but it also has great functionality working with Oracle. And of particular interest to us is the ability to pull data from Excel, CVS files, and other types of flat files.

One of the best features is the classification rules, especially the scan rule sets. They are really useful, especially when we need to understand the current data the company has to ensure that all the problematic data can be put under someone's responsibility.

It gives you the opportunity to know your data and apply policies around it. If those policies are flouted, you can always track what's happening. You have options such as alerting the person who is committing that action, or you can take automatic action by blocking, for example, an email that is been sent externally. It's very useful.

Has a good interface and is reasonably priced.

Although you can explore the data, that creates a great interest in data lineage or the data flow. How does it go from a source to a platform to a Power BI report, for example? It is possible, to some extent, to see that with Purview, but the lineage feature requires some manual work on the development side or more work from Microsoft to improve on it.

Blueprints and landing zones like we have in Azure would be great to see in Purview. The solution could offer a baseline or blueprint of recommended settings for compliance regulations such as GDPR and ISO, which could be applied with a simple switch in the options.

Purview's data connector platform for non-Microsoft data sources is good, but there is some functionality that hasn't been developed yet. There are some servers that it can't connect to yet, because they're still in a trial process.

The overall cost of deploying this solution could be better. It seems that middle and small-sized organizations are not completely happy with deploying this solution in terms of the cost. It would be good if they concentrate on the cost part.

The API needs some improvement when connecting to non-Microsoft API sources. This is a limiting factor.

One area for improvement is the detection of data types. This is really important. It has some of that functionality, but I consider it very limited. Maybe they can add some custom programming or machine learning could be particularly useful for the detection of the nature of the data.

Another area for improvement is in managing the business glossary terms. If they could provide the same type of method that we use to configure the scan rule sets, that would be helpful. Currently, there is no option like this, so we have to do it manually. Automatic detection would be great.

There are some limitations with regard to the lineage of data from different parts of the system.