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Microsoft Fabric

Accelerate your data platform with Microsoft Fabric

What is Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one SaaS (Software as a Service) solution.
The concept of MS Fabric is to have one centralized data lake called oneLake that allows data analysts, data engineers, and data scientist to use and consume business data more efficiently. Fabric brings together services like DataFlow Gen 2, Notebooks, Data Factory, Data Warehousing, Data science, and Power BI on one platform allowing enterprise solutions to be created more efficiently.
More and more organisations are wanting to use data engineering, data analysis, and data science. Previously this was possible, but these groups of developers would work in their own systems. This can cause duplication of data, so more storage space is required. Also, with these development teams working individually this can create longer delivery times for large scale projects.

Start your Fabric Journey…

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Key features of Microsoft Fabric

Scalability

  • Microsoft Fabric grows and scales with your business.
  • Ability to scale up or down as required.
  • Add additional functionality with ease.

Integration of Core Technologies

  • One platform for all development needs.
  • One data lake at the core that integrates with all Fabric services..
  • Compete analytics platform.
  • Integrate with external services like Amazon S3.

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Governance & Compliance

  • Compliant with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
  • Compliant with ISO standards like ISO27001 (Information Security management)
  • Downstream inheritance – sensitivity labels propagates downstream to all dependent items.
  • Data loss prevention.
  • Metadata scanning.

Enterprise Level Collaboration

  • Complete analytics platform
  • Integration with Office 365 applications like Microsoft Teams & SharePoint
  • Empower users with data driven insights
  • Encourages self-service analytics.

Cost Effectiveness

  • Licencing model where businesses can scale up and down depending on the compute power required.
  • Reduced storage costs. With OneLake at the heart of MS Fabric then there is only a need to ingest and store one copy of the data.
  • Reducing cost through unified capacities

Built for Developers

Microsoft Fabric is focused on end user experience, but also supports the needs of the development team.

  • One SaaS application for all development.
  • Supports “low code, no code” approach.
  • Multi language programming compatibility.
  • Optimises speed of project delivery.

Enhanced Security

  • Manage the security of all technologies through MS Entra ID.
  • Reduce complexity for IT security team.
  • Encryption
  • Loss prevention
  • Information protection

AI Integration

  • Integrated with Azure OpenAI Service
  • Copilot enabled with Power BI, Data Factory, Data Science, and Data Engineering.

Domains

  • Create domains within your organisation.
  • Domain administrators for each domain.
  • Ability to apply Data Mesh Architecture.
  • Ability to share and collaborate between domains.

How Datahub can help with a Microsoft Fabric project

Datahub Consulting have already implemented multiple fabric solutions that involved large scale data, used by over 300 business users, across different global regions.

These solutions have been in various industries that include aviation, retail, and healthcare. Our team of experts includes all the core technology specialist like data engineers, data scientists, data analysts, and Power BI subject matter experts that can create semantic models and complex reports and dashboards.

Our team of Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCT) can also support by training your technical team on Microsoft Fabric. Training can take place remotely or at your offices and we can base the training plan around your specific needs. We would also use a small amount of your data for training demo’s so that it’s data that your team know and understand.

How we can help you

  • We can build a solution so that you have a 360 degree view of your business.
  • Gaining valuable insights from your data that will allow for informed business decisions.
  • Building and document requirement from the business’
  • End to end solution based on business requirements.
  • Design an architectural approach with development roadmap and deliverables.
  • Design a security model that will allow your IT team to manage the whole MS Fabric platform easily.
  • Train both technical and non-technical staff. We have supported clients by training their internal teams coding using PySpark, Power BI report development, self service analytics.

Microsoft Fabric Security & Governance

OneLake uses a layered security model built around the organizational structure of experiences within Microsoft Fabric.

Security uses Azure Entra ID authentication and is compatible with user identities, service principals, and managed identities. Using Azure Entra ID and Fabric components, you can build out robust security mechanisms across OneLake, ensuring that you keep your data safe while also reducing copies and minimizing complexity.

  • Continuous – Fabric security is always on. Because it’s embedded in the cloud, it doesn’t rely on a team of experts to keep it running.
  • Configurable – You can configure Fabric security in accordance with your organizational policies.
  • Automated – Many of the Fabric security features are automated. Once configured, these features continue to work in the background.
  • Evolving – Microsoft is constantly improving Fabric security, by adding new features and controls.

Flexibility of MS Fabric Security

On a case by case basis the security can be applied in many ways.

  • Workspace security
  • Item level security
  • Row level security
  • Column level security

Encryption

Data stored in OneLake is encrypted at rest by default using Microsoft-managed key. Microsoft-managed keys are rotated appropriately per compliance requirements. Data in OneLake is encrypted and decrypted transparently using 256-bit AES encryption, one of the strongest block ciphers available, and it is FIPS 140-2 compliant.

Information Protection

Information protection in Fabric enables you to discover, classify, and protect Fabric data using sensitivity labels from Microsoft Purview Information Protection.

Fabric’s information protection capabilities help ensure that all the Fabric items in your organization are labelled. Once labelled, data remains protected even when it’s exported out of Fabric via supported export paths. Compliance admins can monitor activities on sensitivity labels in Microsoft Purview Audit.

Data Loss Prevention

Data loss prevention (DLP) policies help organizations detect and protect their sensitive data. Currently, Fabric supports DLP for Power BI semantic models only. DLP policies detect upload of sensitive data into semantic models. They can detect sensitivity labels and sensitive info types, such as credit card and social security numbers. They can be configured to generate policy tips for semantic model owners and alerts for security admins. DLP policies can also be configured to allow data owners to override them.

Microsoft Fabric Pricing

With Fabric there is currently a per month plan (subscription) with a yearly plan due for release in 2024. With the monthly plans the costs are split into compute and storage. One of the benefits of MS Fabric is that the costs are based on a per hour of usage and billed on a monthly basis.

For organizations that are not a 24/7 operation this means that the fabric capacity can be enabled and disabled based on usage and demand. For example, an organization that operates a standard working week Monday to Friday could use the capacity for 10 hours per day on working days. During the night and weekends, it could be disabled, reducing the hours charged from 720 to 210. Disabling the capacity does not affect the data in Fabric it just means that data cannot be processed, or report queries run against the capacity.

The Fabric capacities are “F” SKUs, and an F64 is the equivalent to the Power BI P1 capacity. The F64 capacity will provide the same number of cores and processing power as the P1. With the F64 organizations can reduce the Power BI licences. As the F64 allows users that only consume reports to use a free licence. Only users that create, publish, and manage the reports will need a Power BI Pro licence.

If the selected capacity is lower than the F64 then all users will need Power BI Pro licences.

Microsoft Fabric – Pricing | Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Fabric Training

Datahub are a consultancy delivering projects to clients but also technical trainers. As partners of Microsoft Datahub Consulting are experts in Microsoft Fabric and can design and deliver bespoke training based on your requirements. We specialise in corporate training so if you want to upskill your team with Microsoft Fabric we can support. All our trainers are Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCT) and are all passed the Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate certification exam DP-600.

Corporate Training

  • Our trainers can deliver 5 day of training covering all aspects of MS Fabric.
  • Alternatively, we can deliver training on specific technologies like data engineering, data science, coding in PySpark, Power BI and data modelling.
  • In-person or remote training
  • Bespoke training so your staff will get the maximum learning experience.
  • Use your data that your team will know and understand.
  • If there is any technical question after the training our training team will be happy to answer.

Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Analytics

There are scenarios where you may wish to analyse your data in real-time. Microsoft Fabric allows you to build Real-Time streaming analytics with Eventstream or Spark Stream. Having the ability within your fabric solution to ingest, transform, and visualise real-time data allows the business to make real-time decisions.

Some examples of real-time applications where Fabric real-time analytics can be used:

  • Monitor log data.
  • Understanding anomalies with sensor data,
  • Website real-time analysis of web traffic.
  • Event monitoring and optimisation.

Not sure if Microsoft Fabric is right for your organisation

You may have a data warehouse and dashboards already and are considering making the transition to MS Fabric. Before embarking on any new technology you’ll want to understand and assess the solution first hand.

Initially get in touch with Datahub Consulting and we can have a conversation over a coffee to answer any of your questions. If you like what you hear then we can discuss the options available based on your current analytical journey.

Datahub Consulting can deliver a Proof of Concept (PoC). Taking a subset of your data, we can ingest the data into OneLake, transform and build business logic into the data, create a semantic model allowing for reports and dashboards to be created.

Also, Microsoft offer a trial of MS Fabric where there is no cost or commitment. This will allow you as a business to evaluate MS Fabric services and functionality.

Having a Datahub PoC with the trial from Microsoft this will allow a low-cost evaluation of the platform using the data that you know and use. Datahub have delivered multiple PoC solutions for clients in the UK and overseas.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Microsoft Fabric is not a free product. There is a 60-day trail where no payment is required but after the 60 days a subscription will be required.

There are various subscriptions available that start at the F2 and goes up to the F2048. For a comparison, the F64 is the equivalent to the Power BI P1 SKU.

Microsoft Fabric licencing guide: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/enterprise/licenses

Microsoft Fabric Pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/microsoft-fabric/

Microsoft Fabric is not replacing Power BI and Power Bi service is still available at: https://app.powerbi.com/

Microsoft Fabric is a SaaS platform that includes a number of technologies that include Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Warehouse, Data Science, and Power BI.

Power Bi is Microsoft’s primary application for creating reports and dashboards along side paginated reports. So Power BI isn’t going away and will not be replaced, it will merely be part of the MS Fabric platform.

MS Fabric has a collection of “personas”. Within Fabric there are many artifacts and to organize these artifacts personas were created. In total there are seven personas. These are: Power BI, Data Factory, Data Activator, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, Synapse Data Warehouse, and Synapse Real-Time Analytics.

An example of artifacts within a persona is: Within the Synapse Data Engineering persona is the artifacts Lakehouse, Notebooks, Environment, Spark Job Definition, Pipeline etc.

Domains are a very large topic. With organizations having access to more and more data to centrally manage all this data is getting unmanageable. For this reason, Data Mesh architecture is a way to decentralize business data. Fabric Domains are used to identify these business units that will be responsible for their own data. In a typical business the domains would be Sales, Marketing, Finance, IT, Customer Services etc. All the data will be on the OneLake but within this data lake the domains will provide separation of the data.

The concept of Domains does not silo the data, there is separation, but the data is still available to business users. For example, if you are part of the marketing team and you require access to the sales domain this is possible. You filter on the sales domain, and you can see all the sales data. In the diagram below the lines represent how collaboration between the domains is possible.

 

With organizations consuming and using more and more data within the business, the idea that it’s centralized and managed by an IT function is getting more and more inefficient. For this reason, data mesh architecture was created.

Data mesh is an architecture is a de-centralized method to consume, share, and collaborate business data. The concept is to create separation of the data within a business so that the business functions can manage their own data. But maintaining the ability to share and provide governance lines between the domains.

The four principles that data mesh architecture follow is:

  • Domain Ownership.
  • Data as a product.
  • Self-serve data platform.
  • Federated computational governance.

What are the benefits?

  • Increased efficiency
  • Increased flexibility
  • Cost effectiveness
  • Better ownership within the business

MS Fabric is now in general availability (GA). It was announced at a Microsoft conference in November 2023.

MS Fabric related announcements

No, MS Fabric is not part of the office 365 suite and as such is not part of any Office 365 licence. With Office 365 E5 licence you do get a Power BI Pro licence allowing you to create and share Power Bi reports and dashboards.

Microsoft Fabric does integrate with Office 365 applications like MS Teams and SharePoint but there are separate licences for MS fabric and Office 265.

If the organization has an MS Fabric subscription and you have been granted access to the Fabric services, then you will be able to use it.

MS Fabric uses MS Entra for security which is previously known as Azure Active Directory. Based on the security in place you will have access to one or many workspaces. For most users Fabric will be for consuming Power BI and Paginated reports. For users with the technical skills, you could have more privileges and can create reports, builds semantic models (previously known as datasets) etc.

Microsoft Fabric has announced the achievement of HIPAA compliance, alongside certifications for ISO 27017, ISO 27018, ISO 27001, and ISO 27701, marking a significant enhancement in the platform’s security and privacy capabilities.

MS Fabric is compliant with data protection laws in the U.S. and Europe.

Reference information:

This will depend on the individual organisation and the requirements of the Proof of Concept.

Factors to consider:

  • Data used in the PoC
  • The requirements
  • The reports that you want as part of the PoC to evaluate MS Fabric.

If you engage with DataHub to create a PoC solution we will have an initially discovery workshop in person at your offices to understand data used in the PoC. Any business requirements this will include any calculations to apply, KPI’s that the business use, who will have access to the data and reports etc. We will also discuss the PoC deliverables so that you can effectively evaluate Microsoft fabric. With this information we would be able to give you a realistic timeline with a cost to deliver.

For a simple PoC with a small amount of data the solution can be delivered in 20 working days.

  • Day 1-2: Access and familiarization with the data.
  • Day 3-4: Confirm requirements with the business.
  • Day 5-8: Ingest the data into OneLake.
  • Day 9-14 Perform any cleansing, transformations, and any other preparation work.
  • Day15-16: Create a semantic model.
  • Day 17-20: Create and publish reports.

Please note that the timeline above would apply to an organisation that already has a data warehouse looking to evaluate MS Fabric. If a data warehouse is in place we would be able to use the current fact and dimension tables to ingest as clean business ready data.

Find out how we can help

We do not employ salespeople; our team are all experienced technical specialists that can talk you through any of our services.

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