Powering data governance at Microsoft with Purview Unified Catalog

Data fuels everything that we do here at Microsoft, from the daily operations that keep the business running to the innovations that shape the future.

But as data sprawls across teams, systems, and borders, the task of ensuring that it remains secure, accurate, and well-governed is a daunting one. A sound approach to data governance is the backbone of responsible data use across the enterprise, creating clarity around data ownership and access.

In an organization the size of Microsoft, no single team can carry this responsibility on its own. Effective data governance must be a distributed effort across all departments and functions.

This story explains how our marketing organization uses the Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog to organize and standardize the data we rely on daily. By putting clear ownership, consistent definitions, and reliable governance in place, we’re turning fragmented, unreliable data into an advantage that supports faster decisions and more effective campaigns.

Data governance at scale

As companies grow, their data governance becomes increasingly complex, with different teams creating their own versions of key data concepts, often without realizing it. The complexity is most visible in the way users across an organization define foundational terms.

“We found adoption to be much easier when helping teams focus on building more value in their data instead of driving governance like a compliance effort.”

Nick Doughty, senior product manager, Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog

Examples in marketing include what counts as a customer (active vs. inactive, marketing- or sales-qualified), what constitutes sensitive data (personally identifiable information, behavioral data, partner data), and what a metric means (conversion, engagement, attribution windows).

When inconsistent practices take hold, ownership becomes murky. With the increasing demands that managing data quality and integrity put on our leaders and their teams, effective data governance becomes one more hurdle to productivity.

“We started off implementing data governance like an issue register,” says Nick Doughty, a senior product manager within Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog. “Then we progressed to more of an enforcement method, similar to how we were doing security at the time. We found that when we started to push really hard on teams, similar to how we drove other compliance efforts, it was difficult for them to justify or understand why they would want the added governance.”

The introduction of Microsoft Azure Purview in 2020 marked a turning point.

A united platform for data governance, security, and compliance, Purview helps organizations understand, protect, and manage data across environments. It also addresses fragmented data, lack of visibility into where sensitive data lives and how it moves, compliance complexity with regulations (including GDPR and HIPAA), and security risks.

“Our marketing teams used to spend hours hunting for the right customer list because multiple versions lived in different locations, each with unclear owners and inconsistent labels. Now our marketers can trust they are working from current information, while avoiding compliance risks associated with incorrect or unauthorized data.”

Sourabh Mathur, principal engineering lead, Global Marketing Engines and Experiences

The Purview Unified Catalog serves as the AI-powered backbone, automatically discovering, classifying, and organizing information so users can easily find and trust the data they need.

By launching the unified catalog, we gave our users a consistent way to understand and use their data, while reinforcing strong governance and compliance practices. The result is data that’s more discoverable, reliable, and actionable. (The product was renamed Microsoft Purview in 2022 and became part of Microsoft 365 compliance tools.)

“Our marketing teams used to spend hours hunting for the right customer list because multiple versions lived in different locations, each with unclear owners and inconsistent labels,” says Sourabh Mathur, a principal engineering lead in Global Marketing Engines and Experiences, who helped set up Purview for our marketing organization.

With the unified catalog in place, Purview surfaces the dataset, shows its lineage, and applies the correct sensitivity classifications.

“Now our marketers can trust they are working from current information, while avoiding compliance risks associated with incorrect or unauthorized customer data,” Mathur says.

Powering marketing at Microsoft with Purview

With more than 200 Microsoft Azure subscriptions, our marketing organization manages one of the largest data estates at the company. The team faces the constant challenge of scattered data, unclear data ownership, and inconsistent governance practices that slow down campaigns and increase compliance risk.

“Marketing can now scale governance across hundreds of data products, support self-service data collection with guardrails, automate access decisions, and enable AI workloads on trusted data.”

Deepak Kumar Biswal, principal software engineering lead, Global Marketing Engines and Experiences

By adopting Purview, our marketing team gained unified visibility, clearer classification standards, and smoother collaboration with other departments, like IT and legal. This reduces friction while strengthening data protection.

The result is an organization that moves faster with greater confidence in how it handles customer and campaign data.

Instead of relying on legacy knowledge, forcing users to dig through different servers and SharePoint sites, or constantly sending queries to the engineering teams, our marketing professionals can now explore the curated Purview Unified Catalog, making streamlined, efficient data discovery possible.

“Marketing can now scale governance across hundreds of data products, support self-service data collection with guardrails, automate access decisions, and enable AI workloads on trusted data,” says Deepak Kumar Biswal, a principal software engineering lead in Global Marketing Engines and Experiences. “Purview turns responsible data use into everyday practice, not extra work.”

Data governance and security: Two sides of the same coin

For our marketing organization, data governance and security are inseparable concepts. As soon as you have customer information, you need to make sure it’s secure—sensitive data must be carefully defined, consistently managed, and protected from misuse or breach.

Purview supports this goal by combining governance capabilities with security and compliance controls that provide added layers of protection.

Within marketing, the governance and security teams work closely together. Good governance measures ensure our data is properly defined and standardized, while strong security policies ensure it’s handled with proper safeguards. By pairing governance with strong security practices, our marketing team can remain compliant with data privacy laws, prevent misuse of sensitive information, and foster trust across their organization.

When our marketing team began its Purview journey five years ago, it adopted a centralized governance model. Much like the structure of a government—where federal, state, and local entities each play a role—our approach allows both centralized standards and local autonomy. This creates consistency across the organization without stifling agility.

Our Data Governance team took on the role of steward, defining standards, onboarding systems, and collaborating with its IT partners to connect data environments. Existing assets like data dictionaries and process flows were used to seed the catalog, ensuring the team started from known ground rather than reinventing definitions from scratch.

This deliberate, incremental approach allowed our marketing team to thoughtfully build out healthy governance practices. By moving slowly, the team learned from each step on its journey, refining processes and establishing consistent practices as it moved along.

For example, working closely with our team in Microsoft Digital allowed them to experiment with different ways of discovering and cataloging their data. This involved taking learn and refine how Purview tuned their data before they rolled anything out broadly.

Our goal is to transition to a completely federated model in which responsibility shifts outward. Rather than the marketing governance team doing all the stewardship, individual groups will take ownership of their data within Purview. This shift distributes accountability, embeds governance deeper into daily operations, and makes it easier for teams to monitor data quality and enforce standards on their own.

Impact across the enterprise

Since adopting Purview Unified Catalog, we’ve seen tangible results across our data estate and our data governance practices in marketing and across all verticals within the company. Here are some companywide highlights:

• Better consolidation: We’ve unified five catalogs into one.
• Increased scale: We added 250 data sources onboarded in six months, representing roughly 10 million assets.
• Higher internal adoption: We set up more than 50 governance domains, an effort we supported with reusable training assets, guides, and onboarding materials.

The benefits also include and extend beyond marketing:

• Teams across the company are gaining increased confidence in their data definitions.
• Compliance and privacy obligations are being met more effectively.
• Business value is being generated through better, more trusted use of data.
• Organizations are benefiting from faster time-to-insight.

Launching the marketing governance domain

We’re using Purview to combine essential capabilities like data governance, classification, and quality checks across our Microsoft services, which creates a unified foundation for our enterprise-wide metadata management. These unified capabilities make Purview an indispensable tool for us, and for large-scale enterprises.

“With various role types like data curator and data reader, we can add more visibility into our data—where it lives, how it’s being used, and who are its primary owners. Clearly defining these parameters helps us use the data governance framework as a starting point and improve our data governance capabilities.”

Vinny Singh, principal program manager, Global Marketing Engines and Experiences

As early adopters of Purview Unified Catalog, the group launched the Marketing Governance domain, registering more than 200 data products using the Unified Catalog’s data map.

The products, spanning various datasets, are aligned with strict internal governance standards. This gives marketing the ability to govern, classify, and track data across its ecosystem—ensuring adherence to GDPR and other regulatory compliance measures.

“With various role types like data curator and data reader, we can add more visibility into our data—where it lives, how it’s being used, and who are its primary owners,” says Vinny Singh, a principal program manager in Global Marketing Engines and Experiences. “Clearly defining these parameters helps us use the data governance framework as a starting point and improve our data governance capabilities.”