Microsoft Purview Alternatives: Choosing The Right Data Governance Solution

Updated September 29th, 2024

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Microsoft Purview is a merger of two existing Microsoft tools, Azure Purview and Microsoft 365 Compliance. “New” Purview aims to provide data catalog, security, and compliance features within the Azure and Microsoft 365 ecosystems.
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While Purview performs effectively within Microsoft ecosystems, it lacks seamless integration with non-Microsoft products. As a result, organizations with complex or heterogeneous technology stacks often enhance Purview with additional data governance solutions to achieve a more comprehensive view of their data estate. This need is driving many companies to explore alternatives to Microsoft Purview—solutions that offer a unified, 360-degree approach to data governance across their entire enterprise.

Table of contents #

  1. Purview alternatives: What to look for
  2. Atlan: Data governance for your entire enterprise
  3. Conclusion
  4. Microsoft Purview alternatives: Related reads

Purview alternatives: What to look for #

Purview offers some advantages for organizations heavily invested in Microsoft technologies. However, it includes a limited number of connectors for non-Microsoft infrastructure, which can reduce its effectiveness for companies that integrate both Microsoft and other solutions in their data stack. If your organization falls into this category, you may find it necessary to implement additional data governance solutions.

When considering Microsoft Purview alternatives, then, there are certain features to look for when shopping for a data governance solution that covers Purview’s feature gaps. This solution should:

  • Support your entire data estate
  • Support modern data catalog features
  • Be easy to set up
  • Provide an accessible user experience across all personas in your org

Supports your entire data estate #


The average large company pulls data from around 400 data sources — and about 40% of these enterprise organizations maintain over 1,000 separate data sources!

Any data governance solution in such a diversified environment needs to be platform-agnostic. It should support a wide variety of data connectors, enabling you to import both data and metadata from as many sources as possible out of the box — without the need to write custom manual code to make your data sources discoverable.

Supports modern data catalog features #


Data governance tools have evolved significantly over the last decade. A modern data governance tool should support all aspects of data management, including:

  • Data quality management
  • Data privacy and compliance
  • Data cataloging and metadata management
  • Data security

Is easy to set up #


Older-generation data governance solutions can take weeks — or even months — to get up and running. This is because they often require supporting infrastructure and specialized knowledge to install and manage.

As a SaaS-based solution, Microsoft Purview customers aren’t required to maintain their own data governance infrastructure. However, setting up and configuring Purview involves far more than hosting. It also means wiring up your data sources, setting up security and authentication, creating and implementing data governance policies, classifying your existing data, and more.

When looking for Microsoft Purview alternatives, it’s important to consider not just installation time but also total time to value.

Provides an accessible user experience across personas #


Older data governance solutions were built primarily for data engineers and IT staff (and it shows in their clunky interfaces). Now that data is the lifeblood of almost every organization, though, business users need data governance that supports how they work, too.

To be successful, a data governance solution needs to be usable by all data stakeholders — both technical and non-technical users alike.

Atlan: Data governance for your entire enterprise #

We built Atlan as a data governance solution that can scale to the needs of the entire enterprise. To accomplish this, Atlan implements the following capabilities:

  • Enterprise-wide data estate coverage
  • Suited for technical and non-technical users
  • Support for active data governance and DataOps
  • Easy to install and maintain

Let’s look at each of these in detail.

Enterprise-wide data estate coverage #


Atlan is vendor-agnostic. It doesn’t matter where your data resides — with Atlan, you can catalog, discover, monitor, classify, and secure it.

Atlan provides out-of-the-box data connectors for dozens of data storage and orchestration systems. This means you can ingest data and metadata without needing to write custom-coded solutions.

Atlan includes support for all major Microsoft data sources and BI tools, including SQL Server, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Synapse, Teams, and Power BI. It also supports tools (e.g., Tableau and ThoughtSpot) that Purview doesn’t.

Atlan supports a state-of-the-art cross-system data lineage system. Once data is ingested, your users can identify the path data takes through your system and explore how it’s been stored and transformed along the way. This builds trust in data and enables identifying the root causes of data quality issues so they can be quickly resolved.

Suited for technical and non-technical users #


A data governance solution can only succeed if everyone in the company can leverage it as a single source of truth. That’s why we built Atlan with an easy-to-use interface that doesn’t assume deep technical knowledge.

Using Atlan, business analysts, managers, and executive decision-makers can find and use data as easily as their IT and data engineer peers can. This empowers business users to find and use data in a self-service manner, removing IT as a potential blocker.

Atlan also employs several personalization features to make data navigation easier, including:

  • Showing data based on the user’s persona, so they only see the data they need
  • Surfacing metadata context for business users via a Chrome extension that works with their BI tools
  • Creating impact analysis reports and alerts for data engineers in GitHub to prevent potential breaking changes to data transformation code
  • Enabling embedded collaboration via tools such as Slack and JIRA, so that teams can work closely together from a single tool

In other words, Atlan presents users with a single interface for finding, using, classifying, and collaborating on data.

Support for active data governance and DataOps #


Data continues to grow at exponential rates. It’s no longer humanly possible to classify, secure, and manage it all manually. This data explosion requires a new, automated approach to data governance.

This is why Atlan supports automation features such as AI suggestions to automate documentation, Playbooks for no-code workflows, and custom programmatic workflows via API orchestration.

Atlan also enables companies to implement active data governance. Using Atlan, you can enable:

  • Shift data governance to the left: Proactively managing data and metadata quality earlier in the data development lifecycle. For example, you can use continuous data quality testing to detect a data anomaly (e.g., a null field that should never be null), issue an alert, and fix it at its source before it breaks downstream reports.
  • Data mesh: A decentralized approach to managing data in which individual domain teams store, process, publish, and version their own data sets.

Easy to install and maintain #


A modern data catalog should be easy to set up. It should not require a team of consultants and months of delays.

Atlan includes a DIY setup that enables you to get up and running in weeks instead of months. And, with dozens of built-in data connectors and a streamlined UI, Atlan makes it possible to realize value from your data governance solution within days.

Conclusion #

When considering Microsoft Purview alternatives, you should consider factors such as support for third-party data sources, time to business value, scalability, and ease of use.

Atlan offers features that seamlessly complement Purview, providing additional support for organizations looking to enhance their data governance capabilities across a broader technology stack.

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Catalog for DataOps, Q3 2024 report awarded Atlan the highest score across all data catalog vendors, including the highest possible scores in 15 criteria such as governance, risk, and compliance, data lineage, adoption, and deployment time-to-value. Forrester described Atlan as ‘an unparalleled partner’ for organizations focused on data democratization.

Atlan combines all these abilities with an easy DIY setup and rich automation features, making it a data governance solution that can scale to the needs of any enterprise.

Want to learn more? Ask for a demo today.

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