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Written by Leon Godwin, Principle Cloud Evangelist

As organisations rapidly accelerate their AI adoption, the democratisation of data has become a massive competitive advantage. However, this broader access to data is also increasing your exposure to security incidents, insider threats, and uncontrolled data sharing. If left unmitigated, these risks can quickly undermine organisational trust and slow down your pace of innovation. 

Integrating Fabric and Purview to close the gap

Historically, data management was characterised by fragmented silos, which created an impressive governance gap. You’ve likely heard the reflection that “AI is only as good as your data”. If your underlying data estate is not secure, compliant, and governed, your AI initiatives will inevitably falter. According to a recent Microsoft Security Blog, a staggering 86% of organisations lack visibility into their AI data flows, operating completely in the dark regarding the specific information their employees are sharing with AI systems. Furthermore, 67% of executives remain uncomfortable utilising data for AI initiatives due to persistent quality and security concerns. 

Today, Microsoft Fabric solves these systemic inefficiencies by unifying your data estate with a data moderisation platform. 

By integrating Microsoft Fabric with Microsoft Purview, organisations can finally close the AI security gap. This powerful combination allows data and AI leaders to enforce a “secure by default” environment, applying fine-grained access controls, mitigating insider risks, and preventing the oversharing of sensitive information in AI prompts. Ultimately, unified data governance is no longer just a regulatory checkbox. Data governance is now the key ingredient to innovation without compromising on security. 

Data governance implementation

To successfully implement this unified data governance strategy, organisations must move beyond theory and leverage the native capabilities built into Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview. Here are the concrete features and operational steps you should prioritise: 

  • Universal OneLake Security: Transition away from configuring security in every individual AI model or report. Fabric’s OneLake allows you to configure Object-Level Security (OLS), Row-Level Security (RLS), and Column-Level Security (CLS) directly at the data source. This “define once, enforce everywhere” approach ensures that however a user sends a query the exact same permissions apply natively. 
  • Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Sensitivity Labels: Deep integration with Microsoft Purview allows you to apply sensitivity labels that persist as data flows from the lakehouse all the way down to exported Office files. Fabric also supports DLP policies that can automatically detect sensitive data, trigger policy tips, and restrict access to structured data in warehouses and databases to prevent data oversharing. 
  • Federated Governance via Domains: Avoid the bottleneck of a strictly centralised IT team by grouping your data into logical “Domains” (e.g., Finance, HR, Marketing). This allows you to delegate domain-specific governance and administration to the respective business units while still maintaining tenant-wide security guardrails. 
  • Insider Risk Management (IRM): Protect your intellectual property by leveraging IRM indicators for Fabric. These tools monitor user activity within the Lakehouse to detect and alert you to risky behaviours, such as the mass exporting of sensitive reports or potential data exfiltration. 
  • Lineage, Impact Analysis, and Endorsement: Establish trust in your data estate. Fabric provides visual data lineage to track the flow of data from source to destination, helping you answer “what breaks if I change this data?”. Pair this with the “Endorsement” feature to clearly label trustworthy, certified data items, guiding business users to the right source of truth. 
  • Network Security: Move beyond public internet access. Secure your environment by implementing Private Links to ensure traffic between your infrastructure and Fabric routes over the secure Microsoft global network, and utilise customer-managed keys to encrypt sensitive data at rest. 

Ultimately, Microsoft Fabric represents a significant shift in the data platform landscape, offering the potential to eliminate data sprawl and simplify governance. However, simply having access to these native capabilities is not enough. Transitioning to this unified environment requires a commitment to “governance by design” by treating security, compliance, and quality as foundational elements rather than afterthoughts. From automated access restrictions in OneLake to advanced insider risk detection, Microsoft Fabric and Purview work together to ensure that protection is built-in, consistent, and end-to-end. The true challenge for organisations lies in execution. Start by establishing the right strategic frameworks, a data culture, and planning a phased rollout that balances speed with architectural rigour. 

 Next Steps: Join our webinar

To help you navigate these challenges and confidently adopt Microsoft Fabric, I am thrilled to announce that I will be co-hosting an exclusive 60-minute webinar alongside Rana Kamel, Cloud and Data Solution Architect at Microsoft. 

Event Details: 

  • Webinar: Mastering Security & Governance in Microsoft Fabric 
  • Date: Wednesday, 10th June 2026 
  • Time: 10:00 – 11:00 (Online) 
  • Speakers: Rana Kamel (Microsoft) & Leon Godwin (Cloud Direct) 

Don’t let security concerns hold back your AI and data transformation. Sign-up today to save the date in your diary.  

You’re probably aware of Microsoft Fabric. But if you’re unclear whether it adds real value to your data analytics, you’re not alone. There’s some confusion around the relationship between Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. Here, we address common misconceptions, explain how Fabric provides a unified data platform and provide the opportunity to evaluate it at a consultant-led workshop.    

Power BI–Fabric confusions

Microsoft Fabric is described as a ‘unified analytics platform’ covering data engineering, data pipelines, data warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, and Power BI. While it is all those things, and more, it’s this positioning that may be the cause of three common misconceptions:  

  • Fabric is the ‘new Power BI’ 
  • Fabric is replacing Power BI 
  • You need Fabric to use Power BI. 

Misconception 1: Fabric is the ‘new Power BI’ 

Microsoft Fabric isn’t the new Power BI, but it does incorporate it into an end-to-end data platform. Power BI remains the place where users consume insights, while Fabric handles everything that happens before that data reaches a dashboard. 

Misconception 2: Fabric is replacing Power BI 

PowerBI will remain to be the integral analytics and visualisation interface within the Microsoft portfolio. Alongside this Fabric will expand the backend data capabilities and provide greater integration, meaning PowerBI users will still utilise the same day-to-day interface. 

Misconception 3: You need Fabric to use Power BI 

If you’re using Power BI with Pro (ie standard) or Premium Per User licences, you can still use Power BI standalone. You don’t need Fabric to build reports, share dashboards, and run most BI workloads. It’s only at the capacity-based Power BI Premium licensing level that things start to overlap with Fabric. 

Like many other organisations, you may be using Power BI for reporting, Azure Data Factory for pipelines, and Synapse as your data platform.  

Fabric now brings all these capabilities together, so there’s also a misconception that this ‘new thing replaces old thing’. In fact, all this functionality lives on within Fabric, and is augmented.   

In reality: 

  • Microsoft Fabric = a complete end-to-end data platform, and 
  • Power BI = the analytics, visualisation, and reporting within it. 

Licensing: is Fabric essentially an upsell? 

The short answer is no. While Microsoft Fabric does require separate licensing, for IT leaders it’s much more nuanced than ‘another platform, another bill’. On the face of it, Fabric looks like an additional platform: new name (Fabric), new portal, and new capabilities. So, it seems like a net-new purchase decision. With the added unpredictability of capacity pricing.    

But it also represents an opportunity to consolidate and rationalise: 

  • replacing multiple Azure services 
  • unifying data architecture  
  • reducing integration overhead, and 
  • simplifying governance. 

Licensing in a nutshell: Power BI is typically licensed on a per user basis through Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium User (PPU) subscriptions. Although some organisations are utilising capacity-based Power BI Premium licensing. Fabric licensing is based on capacity units (of compute + storage + workloads) which power data engineering, and all other functions in Fabric including Power BI workloads. This is a key point – Power BI can run on Fabric capacity.

It also reflects the broader shift from the old world of separate tools (here Power BI, Synapse and Azure Data Factory) to the new world. Fabric provides a single, unified data platform that provides: 

  • one storage layer (OneLake) 
  • one compute model 
  • one governance layer 
  • one billing model. 

Using Power BI, but not yet Fabric? What value does it add? 

If your organisation isn’t using Fabric, you may be asking:  

  • What problem does it solve for us? 
  • Do we need this now, or can we wait? 

In answering these questions, there are two things to consider. First, ask yourself ‘Do we just need reporting, or do we need a full data platform?’ 

Use Power BI alone: 

  • When you need dashboards and reporting 
  • If data sources are already prepared, and 
  • You don’t need complex data engineering. 

Adopt Fabric if you need: 

  • An end-to-end data pipeline 
  • Want a unified data platform 
  • To modernise your data estate, and/or  
  • To prepare for AI and advanced analytics. 

Which brings us to your second consideration: your AI strategy.  

Fabric helps organisations create a governed, reusable data foundation that’s essential for effective AI. The real value isn’t just ‘doing AI’, it’s ensuring data is trustworthy, shared, and consistently governed. Those foundations are where most organisations struggle, and they’re not something Power BI alone can solve. 

Added to this Fabric will provide a host of data benefits, such as data mirroring. Instead of manually transferring or duplicating data into Power BI, Fabric can mirror data from external sources directly into OneLake. This keeps data automatically in sync, reduces engineering effort, and ensures reporting stays up to date without any manual movement of data. 

Learn more about Fabric 

Organisations don’t always get the opportunity for hands-on learning to better understand the complexities of these platforms and their possibilities. That’s why we have started to deliver a programme of consultant-led workshops, produced alongside Microsoft.  

The next of these free, one-day, online workshops is on Wednesday 27 May. Learn more and register.  

‘Fabric Analyst in a Day’ is suitable for those familiar with Power BI data analysis, but new to Fabric. It is intermediate-level and will show you Fabric’s end-to-end analytics capabilities in practice: from data ingestion to report creation, with automatic refresh. 

By the end of the workshop attendees will understand: 

  • If and how Fabric can add value to their organisation
  • The productivity gains possible with Fabric’s integrated analytics capabilities  
  • How to unify and transform multi-source data with Shortcuts, Dataflows Gen 2 and Pipelines. 
Register for Fabric Analyst in a Day on May 27

Fabric is not just a product add-on; it’s a platform shift. It brings Power BI into a broader, end-to-end data platform. Power BI remains the layer where users consume insights, while Fabric handles everything that happens before that data reaches a dashboard. This means organisations can spend less time managing data and more time using it to make decisions. 

As data estates continue to grow in complexity, the burden on IT teams to deliver accurate, timely insights is heavier than ever. Many organisations whose data environments have grown organically over years are experiencing data sprawl, infrastructure inefficiencies and limited interoperability. The question now becomes how to evolve into something more unified, scalable, and future ready.

That’s exactly why we were eager to deliver an interactive Fabric Analyst in a Day workshop, in partnership with Microsoft. This workshop provided data analysts, BI specialists and technical decision makers with a guided, hands-on introduction to Microsoft Fabric, grounded in real practice rather than high-level theory.

Following our most recent workshop we caught up with our course leaders and technical consultants, Andy Jones and Kabita Thapa, to discover the key insights from day.

What is Microsoft Fabric?

For many attendees, Fabric was something they had heard of but never had the opportunity to properly explore. As Andy Jones explained during the session, Fabric brings together what used to be multiple, separate Azure and Power BI components into one cohesive platform.

Traditionally, delivering an analytics project meant stitching together different services and platforms, each with its own configuration, deployment steps, security model, and costs. Fabric replaces this complexity with a single, integrated environment where:

  • Data Factory
  • Data Engineering
  • Data Science
  • Data Warehouse
  • Real‑Time Intelligence
  • Power BI reporting
  • And Databases

…all live in one place.

This integrated experience ensures your whole data team, from data analysts to senior data engineers have the capabilities they need. The result is a more cohesive and efficient way to unlock business value from data.

Hands‑on learning in Fabric: The advantages of practical application

A key consideration for the day was participants wanting real experience in Fabric, not just another slide deck. Many had been working in Power BI or other analytics tools for years but had never stepped into the broader Fabric environment.

That’s why the hands‑on labs were so powerful.

Attendees moved through each stage of the analytics lifecycle throughout the day, from ingestion to transformation to visualisation. At each stage practical tasks provided the opportunity for attendees to explore the platform independently using synthetic data to replicate how they might use the tool in the real-world. Kabita and Andy were able to guide attendees one-on-one to build confidence and answer any questions.

One participant, who had previously relied heavily on Excel for reporting and visualisation, remarked how refreshing it was to experiment with Fabric ahead of their organisation rolling it out. Providing them the essential insight into how it can be used to evolve their reporting into a scalable, governed model.

Key Fabric benefits highlighted

1. A single place for all your data: introducing OneLake

The OneDrive for your data, introducing OneLake – Fabric’s central data hub. OneLake brings all organisational data into one governed location rather than scattering it across services and storage accounts. This resonated strongly with attendees during the workshop, and reflects one of Fabric’s most compelling benefits: fewer moving part means more control.

2. Built‑In AI for Faster Insight

Attendees were excited to hear about Copilot in Fabric, where AI assistance is embedded directly in the platform. From transforming data to narrating visuals to suggesting insights, AI is infused throughout the Fabric platform.

3. Practical Skills That Apply Across Roles

Whether you’re a Power BI analyst, a data scientist, or an IT professional responsible for governance and security, Fabric offers benefits that map naturally to different job roles. It also empowers a data culture across the business, with seamless integration from data to visualisation.  

Common Microsoft Fabric Misconceptions

A recurring myth uncovered in the workshop is that adopting Microsoft Fabric means rebuilding everything or starting from scratch. Andy addressed this directly:

“In reality, attendees saw how Fabric can complement and extend existing Microsoft data investments while simplifying the overall architecture.”

Fabric works with, not against, your existing Microsoft investments. Teams can modernise at their own pace without wholesale migration.

Another misconception is treating Fabric as a set of separate features. As both Andy and Kabita emphasised, the real value comes from the interconnectedness of the platform, not individual components.

Why Attendees Found the Day Valuable

  • They gained exposure to parts of the Microsoft data stack they’d never used before
  • They could troubleshoot in real time with two expert instructors
  • They left with clarity on how Fabric fits into their organisation’s analytics maturity
  • They experienced the end‑to‑end journey of a modern analytics workflow

Feedback from attendees:

Allowing a VM (Virtual Machine) environment so we can effectively trail the tool in a protected environment was really good

The content was really detailed and useful to understand Microsoft Fabric and the trainers were really proactive and helpful.

Course leaders were very knowledgeable and helpful if attendees had any issues with the labs

What’s Next? Pathways following the Fabric Analyst in a Day Workshop

All attendees received a certificate for completing the workshop, but what’s next on their Fabric journey. Depending on their own roles there are many paths that they can take, including:

This workshop is the start of a clear route to certification that can make learning Fabric feel more concrete and something attendees could integrate into their professional development goals.

If you would like to attend a future Fabric Analyst in a Day workshop or want to discuss how Microsoft Fabric can better enable your organisation for innovation. Reach out to our experts using the form below.

Cloud Direct’s Data & AI Practice Lead Dan Knott explains how you can strike a workable balance between speed of delivery, cost, and effectiveness with Microsoft Fabric.  

I spend a lot of my time talking to executives and technologists. I understand the time and cost constraints; I understand the pressure to implement fast; I understand that many don’t have the appetite for lengthy assessments and strategising. But I also know that without some consideration of four key factors outside of, but directly impacting, Microsoft Fabric you’ll probably fail.    

But first, a quick reminder.  

Microsoft Fabric in a nutshell

You probably already know of Microsoft Fabric. It is a one-stop shop for data: a unified data platform that can ingest, process, analyse, and visualise your data. It centralises data storage in OneLake – a single, integrated data lake that supports structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data – and combines capabilities from Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Data Factory into a seamless experience.  

Since its November 2023 launch into General Availability, Microsoft has continued to add functionality and, if you’re not already, you should now be looking at it.

Is Fabric a quick win?

Many in IT are going to look at this as a relatively easy implementation. But is it a quick win?  

In one sense, yes. Fairly quickly, you can get to the point where it’s installed, providing some nice dashboards, and offering an incremental improvement over Power BI.   

But in terms of delivering genuine business value, it won’t.  

You’re going to hit obstacles. I know this because those that have gone before you are consistently telling me: “we tried to implement Fabric”, “we hit some bottlenecks”, and “the adoption wasn’t quite there”. 

Navigating the pitfalls and driving real value from Fabric

While Fabric will happily ingest data from anywhere, it won’t fix fundamental data issues and it relies on users asking the right questions.  

So, consider how the business is going to benefit from Fabric. There are valid analytical, AI, and machine learning use cases. If your use case is analytical, for example, and your interest is in sales, are you looking forwards or backwards? If you’re looking back, what lessons are you trying to take from this? If your focus is the future, how does this need to align with your growth or business strategy?  

Regardless of your objectives, if people don’t trust the data then they’ll soon stop using Fabric. This, in itself, raises questions around the data, like its reliability and accuracy (realistically some areas will be better than others), who owns it, and security and governance considerations around who can access what.   

Given the chance, I’ll always argue passionately for a strategic consideration of what I call your four key pillars: innovation, platform and technology, process and tools, and people and culture. It’ll help you to understand where you currently have gaps, where you can reliably use Fabric now, any priority areas for action, and enable you to make longer term plans. In short, it’ll enable you to ensure that your organisation can derive real business value from Fabric straight away.

Reality bites

Set against this, there are time and budget pressures: “we need to get this in”, “let’s do it and find out”, “what’s the worst that could happen?” 

But from what I’m seeing and hearing, without a bit of thought and planning your implementation won’t get much beyond a tick in the box.  

The adoption of Fabric is far wider than just putting the tech in, and if you’re familiar with project management’s ‘Iron Triangle’ you’ll know that when it comes to cheap, fast and good, and can only have two of them.

Striking the right balance

With a little planning and thought, a lot of the pitfalls can be managed and, to an extent, avoided.  

Your journey probably won’t be the same as everybody else’s, but if we think in terms of the four pillars I mentioned, you’ll already know that there are some gaps.  

What do you want to gain from your data? It needs to be grounded in purpose.  

Are there data quality issues? Who’s accountable for this data? Are there governance considerations, perhaps around compliance and who can see which data? Do users have the skills to use the data well?     

This will quickly tell you if ‘just do it’ feels rash or even scary, and whether or not you’re setting up Fabric to ultimately fail.     

So, why not incorporate a bit of planning up front? Make sure that we’ve got the whole picture and have given some thought to those other areas which will impact the wider implementation of Fabric. 

There’s often a lot of value to be gained from a thorough Data Strategy Assessment, but much depends on where you already are and, of course, time and budget pressures. This is where one of our Maturity Assessments will help you quickly create solid foundations for your Fabric implementation.    

Microsoft Fabric really can show the value, purpose, and reliability of your data – but please, please, please put a little time into ensuring that your project can deliver business value, and ultimately succeed, before you get started.   

If you’d like an informal chat about how you can best approach your use of Fabric, you can get in touch, using the form below.  

It’s no secret that businesses are producing more data than ever, and you will only be able to drive greater efficiencies and enable innovation once you have a clear strategy with the right tools in place.

Earlier this year, Microsoft launched Fabric, their all-in-one data solution, for general availability. Microsoft Fabric combines some of Microsoft’s most powerful tools, such as Data Factory, Synapse Analytics, Data Explorer, and Power BI into a unified, cloud-based platform to help simplify your data workflow. The combination of the tools will enable you to innovate with AI safely and securely by managing your data in a single user-friendly platform.