Glossary
Azure data and AI terms explained
IITS defines the core terms of Azure data engineering, AI, FinOps, LLMOps, compliance and data governance — in Dutch and English. Used by Dutch SME data teams daily.
Azure Data Lake
A scalable cloud storage service (Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2) built on Azure Blob Storage, designed for big data analytics workloads. Supports hierarchical namespaces for efficient file operations and fine-grained access control.
Microsoft Fabric
A unified SaaS analytics platform from Microsoft that integrates data engineering, data integration, data warehousing, real-time analytics and Business Intelligence in a single product. The successor to Azure Synapse Analytics, built on OneLake.
FinOps
Cloud Financial Operations — a practice and cultural movement that enables organisations to maximise the business value of cloud spend. FinOps turns cloud costs from a variable unknown into a managed, predictable metric aligned with engineering and business teams.
Data Lineage
The end-to-end record of where data originates, how it moves, how it transforms, and where it lands. Essential for GDPR compliance, audit trails, and debugging broken data pipelines. Tools like Microsoft Purview and Pharos automate lineage collection.
Power BI Governance
A set of policies, processes, and tools that control who can create, publish, certify, and share Power BI reports. Includes workspace management, data source certification, sensitivity labels, GDPR classification, and usage monitoring.
GDPR
General Data Protection Regulation — EU Regulation 2016/679. Requires organisations to protect the personal data and privacy of EU citizens. Applies to any organisation processing EU residents' personal data. Non-compliance penalties can reach €20 million or 4% of global annual turnover.
Data Lakehouse
A data architecture that combines the flexible storage of a data lake with the data management and query performance features of a data warehouse. Microsoft Fabric's OneLake is a data lakehouse implementation. Eliminates the traditional ETL pipeline between lakes and warehouses.
Azure Landing Zone
A pre-configured, scalable and secure Azure environment implementing the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) guidelines. Provides networking, identity, governance and security baselines so workloads can be deployed on a solid foundation — without configuring everything from scratch.
ETL / ELT
Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) and Extract, Load, Transform (ELT) are data integration patterns. Modern cloud platforms (Azure Data Factory, Databricks, Fabric) prefer ELT: raw data is loaded first, then transformed inside the platform where compute is elastic and cost-efficient.
Data Governance
The collection of policies, processes, standards, metrics, roles and tools that help organisations manage their data as an asset. Includes data quality, data cataloguing, metadata management, data stewardship and compliance documentation. Microsoft Purview is the primary tool for data governance on Azure.