Azure Purview, Synapse Analytics, Power BI and the "paradox of analytics"

Microsoft has announced Azure Purview, a unified data governance service to track data lineage, discover data, and compile a business glossary spanning on-prem, SaaS apps, cloud locations and Power BI. Purview comes integrated with Microsoft Information Protection, which allows users to apply sensitivity labels as defined in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center.

In a recent blog post on the service, Microsoft CVP Julia White emphasized the importance of reducing data silos. She described what she termed the "paradox of analytics": over the course of recent decades advanced data warehouses and data lakes has increasingly divided data, leading hyper-specialization and niche tools.

Microsoft's efforts to address these challenges to date has resulted in the creation of Synapse Analytics, which provides data integration tooling, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics under one service, together with data engineering, machine learning and business intelligence.