The practices and tools for managing data quality, security, privacy, and compliance across an organization. Like the rules and policies a library uses to catalog, protect, and provide access to its book collection — ensuring the right people can find and use the right data responsibly.
A healthcare organization uses Microsoft Purview to automatically discover and classify all patient data across their Azure data lake, SQL databases, and file shares — tagging sensitive health records, tracking who accesses them, and ensuring HIPAA compliance with automated audit trails.
These services support data governance by helping organizations discover and catalog data, manage metadata, classify sensitive data, and control/track access. Microsoft Purview is broad across cataloging, classification, and compliance reporting; Amazon DataZone focuses on data cataloging and governed data sharing; Google Dataplex provides governance and metadata management across lakes/warehouses; OCI Data Catalog provides metadata management and discovery, often paired with OCI IAM and security services for access controls.