SC-100 Practice Question: Design solutions that align with security best practices and priorities
A company plans to use Microsoft Purview to manage data governance across their on-premises SQL Server databases and Azure SQL databases. They need to classify sensitive data and create a unified data map. Which resource should they deploy?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Azure Data Factory's data movement capabilities with Purview's governance role, or mistakenly think Azure Synapse Analytics can perform classification because it includes data warehousing and some security features.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Microsoft Purview
Microsoft Purview is the correct choice because it provides a unified data governance service that can scan both on-premises SQL Server and Azure SQL databases, automatically classify sensitive data using built-in classifiers (e.g., PII, financial info), and build a centralized data map. This aligns with the requirement to manage data governance across hybrid environments with a single pane of glass.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Microsoft Purview
Why this is correct
Microsoft Purview is the correct choice because it is Microsoft's unified data governance and compliance platform, providing automated scanning, classification, and labeling of data assets across cloud and on-premises sources. It includes the Data Map, Data Catalog, and Data Estate Insights to give a central inventory, track lineage, and enforce sensitivity labels via Microsoft Information Protection, which aligns directly with the company's data governance requirement.
- ✗
Azure Synapse Analytics
Why it's wrong here
Azure Synapse Analytics is a cloud-based big data and analytics service that combines SQL, Spark, and data pipelines, but its focus is on querying, transforming, and deriving insights from large datasets—not on governing or classifying data across an organization. While Synapse offers security controls like workspace isolation, column-level security, and dynamic data masking, these are scoped to individual analytic workloads and cannot provide the unified metadata catalog, policy enforcement, and cross-source classification that Microsoft Purview offers.
- ✗
Azure Data Factory
Why it's wrong here
Azure Data Factory is a cloud data integration and orchestration tool used for building ETL/ELT pipelines to move and transform data between various sources. It does not provide native data classification, cataloging, or sensitivity labeling capabilities; its monitoring and lineage features are primarily operational, and any governance-related visibility is achieved by integrating with Microsoft Purview, which illustrates that Data Factory itself is not a data governance solution.
- ✗
Azure SQL Database
Why it's wrong here
Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database service that stores and executes queries on structured data, and while it includes security features like SQL Data Discovery and Classification, dynamic data masking, and auditing, those capabilities apply only to the specific database instance and do not scale to govern an entire data estate. The organization's requirement to manage data governance across multiple sources demands a centralized governance plane like Microsoft Purview, not a single database service.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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