Describe the concepts and benefits of data governance
Historically, data governance has been a defense mechanism, a way to make sure your data is secure and compliant. But good data governance also makes your data more visible to your users and provides many opportunities to reunite your business with the data that fuels it.
Microsoft Purview data governance solutions leverage AI and modern technologies to ensure data quality, security, and compliance while also accelerating value creation. Before going into the descriptions of these solutions, it's important to understand some key principles and concepts associated with data governance.
Data governance concepts
Federated governance provides a centralized place to develop data safety, quality, and standards, but provides tools to create self-service access control, discoverability, and maintenance. Federated data governance spreads ownership across your business, reducing bottlenecks and encouraging participation in the life cycle of managing, governing, consuming, and applying data.
Data access is about quickly providing the right access and enforcing the right use to balance safety and innovation.
Data curation is about organizing, annotating, and publishing your data so that it's safely accessible, reuseable, and protected.
Data discovery is about ensuring users can find the data they need for day-to-day business and innovation.
Data health is about ensuring data quality standards are maintained across your estate, and having an active data lifecycle keeping your data fresh and secure.
Data understanding is about ensure data has quality descriptors that help users understand what the data is and how it should be used.
Data roles and responsibilities
Data consumers quickly find and use relevant, trusted datasets through streamlined access request workflow.
Data owners register data assets for use, manage classifications and access, and ensure high quality standards.
Data stewards ensure data quality, seamless data discovery, glossary consistency, and lineage.
Central data office establish and ensure governance policies, active metadata, compliance, and insights into overall governance health.
Benefits of data governance
Good data governance helps reveal your data's business value and simplifies data management as your data estate grows. It provides important benefits to the different data roles:
- For organization-wide data consumers:
- Data discovery - helps you easily find the data you need.
- Secure access - facilitates safe access to your data.
- Data understanding - providing what you need to know about the data.
- For data owners and stewards:
- Data curation and management - helps you deliver high quality data that's easy to understand and safely access for organization-wide applications.
- Responsible data use - helps you ensure that your data is used by intended users for intended purposes.
- Impact analysis - understand actions on the data that may impact your data.
- For data officers and CxO stakeholders:
- Data value creation - maximize value creation from your data while reducing operations spend.
- Data estate standardization - create common controls across your data estate with federated accountability so your data is healthy and safe.
Microsoft Purview data governance delivers on these benefits through the rich set of features in Microsoft Purview Data Catalog.