Microsoft acquired BlueTalon and its Unified Data Access Control solution in a bid to increase data privacy and data security. BlueTalon will become part of Microsoft's Azure Data Governance group and aims to simplify large-scale data governance tasks for customers. Microsoft provided few additional details about how the technology will be incorporated with Azure.

According to BlueTalon CEO, Eric Tilenius, the company got its start providing governance for systems like Hadoop. Rohan Kumar, corporate VP for Azure Data identified wide-ranging changes in data management, with the rise of fit-for-purpose systems linking cloud and on-prem such as data lakes, SaaS apps, RDBM or NoSQL.  In fact, 57 percent of respondents to a Gartner survey identified data governance and data security as key challenges in managing data. Kumar stated: