Family of Microsoft products for data governance, security and compliance. Its Data Map stores only metadata, such as lineage, schema and classification, never the data itself.
Also called Azure Purview, Azure Purview.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
AZ-305SC-500AZ-900DP-900SC-900SC-200DP-600ALZ
Each book explains Microsoft Purview in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Governance
Keeping cloud deployments in line with an organisation's rules on technology, security and compliance, helped by Azure Policy, tags and resource locks.
- Microsoft Purview Data Map
The technical foundation of Microsoft Purview, which scans data sources to keep a current picture of an organisation's data, including classifications and lineage. It stores only metadata.
- Metadata
Describes data rather than being the data itself, for instance how a file is laid out or what rows each chunk contains, so tools can read things efficiently.
- Schema
The middle part of a Unity Catalog name (
catalog.schema.table), grouping tables, views, volumes, functions and models inside a catalog. A grant on it covers everything in it now and later, and nothing inside can be reached withoutUSE SCHEMA. - Classification
Predictive, supervised learning that assigns an item to one of a set of categories, for instance deciding whether an email is spam; it isn't generative.
Related terms
- Activity explorer
A Microsoft Purview view of the last 30 days of events involving sensitive or labelled items, for example a label being added, altered or taken off, or a DLP rule being triggered. Its data comes from the unified audit log.
- Adaptive Protection
A Microsoft Purview capability in which Insider Risk Management rates each person as Minor, Moderate or Elevated risk. DLP, Conditional Access and data lifecycle policies then adjust automatically, so the tightest restrictions fall on the highest-risk people only.
- Adaptive scope
A dynamic way to target Microsoft Purview retention, auto-labelling or communication compliance policies, where a query on attributes such as department selects the users, groups or sites and is re-run every day. A static scope is the fixed alternative.
- Compliance Administrator
Looks after compliance capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Inside Defender for Cloud Apps the same Entra role has read access to everything and also handles alerts and file policies.
- Compliance Data Administrator
Tracks compliance data in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Inside Defender for Cloud Apps this Entra role has read access to everything, may build or edit file policies, and can open discovery reports.
- Compliance Manager
Helps an organisation measure itself against regulations and standards: ready-made assessments test its controls, suggested improvement actions show what to fix, and a compliance score records progress. Part of Microsoft Purview.
- Data Catalog
Older Azure service for cataloguing data, now replaced by Microsoft Purview; it isn't used for grouping resources.
- Data explorer
Lists, in Microsoft Purview, every item currently tagged with a sensitivity or retention label or containing a sensitive information type, together with where it sits. To open those items, an admin needs membership of two role groups: List viewer and Content viewer.