What is driving the move to Microsoft Fabric?
OneLake: one home for all your data
OneLake is a central concept of the Microsoft Fabric offer. As the name suggests, it's a place for all your data. Microsoft often cites OneDrive to help describe what OneLake does. Just as you can manage all your files in OneDrive, you can manage all your data in OneLake. You can even use File Explorer in Windows to get an overview of your data.
This is a good example of a recurring theme in Microsoft Fabric — simplifying administration and user experience, making previously technical tasks accessible to non-technical users or citizen developers. Ultimately, this means democratisation — making it easier for more consumers to access data.
Direct Lake and the VertiParq engine
Microsoft Fabric achieves something entirely new by using the VertiParq engine together with the Delta Parquet format in OneLake. Direct Lake is a query mode that allows Power BI to read data directly from OneLake without importing or caching it first, combining the speed of in-memory models with the freshness of live queries.
Queries can now be run directly on compressed data in OneLake with good performance. For users, this reduces or eliminates the need for data copying and duplication that may have been required for performance reasons in legacy systems.
Shortcuts and mirroring: less ETL, less technical debt
Shortcuts allow you to reference data in external systems directly from OneLake — meaning you can completely avoid, or at least significantly simplify, ETL processes (Extract, Transform & Load) to collect external data. Mirroring goes a step further: it gives you an automatically updated, replicated copy of an external database without writing any special code.
Updates are managed automatically using change data capture technology. In these ways, the need for manually constructed transformations decreases, thereby reducing technical debt whilst improving data quality.
Better AI with proven data quality in Microsoft Fabric
We have seen many AI pilots over recent months, often with limited and quite general use cases. The natural next step is to focus on use cases that create real competitive advantages, leveraging data from our own unique business operations. This is where we see Microsoft Fabric playing a key role.
"If AI is our goal and our data is our fuel, then we need a vehicle to make the journey to that goal. We believe that vehicle is Fabric."
To succeed with AI, we need to simplify the challenging but essential task of acquiring, organising, and refining the data which underpins our AI applications. Fabric's components help us achieve controlled and proven data quality, ensuring that AI processes the right data in the right way. By simplifying this critical task, we can spend more time building unique competitive advantages. For instance, when using Azure AI Studio, it is fully integrated with Microsoft Fabric.
Ask open questions with Copilot in Power BI
Within Microsoft Fabric, Copilot support for data engineering lowers the barrier to building better and more efficient data pipelines, with less overhead from code reviews and testing iterations. There is also Copilot support for data science, aiding, for instance, in the development and execution of predictive models.
Perhaps the most exciting Copilot feature is the ability to support a conversation with data as part of Power BI. Please note: this feature's availability and licensing requirements have continued to evolve since its preview launch — we recommend checking the latest Microsoft documentation for current status before building a business case around it. The use cases that this feature opens are very appealing to analysts and those working in the decision-making process.
Typically, the starting point might be that a problem owner only has access to prefabricated or static reports which can only partially provide the answers needed for a given problem statement. When the fixed format of these reports is too restrictive for idea generation or more specific exploration, the consumer is left without a simple solution.
While this limitation may sometimes be intentional, the ability to ask questions in natural language and to track down more complex root cause analysis significantly enhances the analysis process, leading to faster and better insights. The Copilot capability in Power BI creates freedom for spontaneous questions to be answered instantly, for example during ongoing meetings or discussions.
Easier cost control with Fabric capacity licensing
Customers for data platforms have increasingly demonstrated reduced willingness to pay for storage but continued acceptance of paying for computing. This is a logical consequence of scenarios like data collection from a company's products when used by customers, creating vast amounts of data. This data holds no value at rest but becomes valuable only once activated. Microsoft Fabric enables working in this manner and obtaining a cost structure which matches the value structure.
Historically, data activation has involved various types of server allocation and data duplication, often accompanied by complex cost calculations and even guesswork about what the costs will be. The licensing model of Microsoft Fabric is significantly simplified, especially when used with Power BI. Depending on your current data platform situation, this alone can be reason enough to consolidate all data processing under Fabric.
A simpler cloud journey from on-premises to Fabric
If you are currently using on-premises solutions for your data platform but plan to move to the cloud, you're in luck with your timing!
Transitioning from on-premises to a modern cloud-based data platform is widely acknowledged to come with benefits such as simpler administration, better scalability, security and cost.
However, with Microsoft Fabric, you can now achieve a new level of simplicity and cost optimisation. This means you can more quickly reach goals like modernised decision support or entirely new AI applications. A more homogeneous and straightforward tech stack reduces technical debt in the upcoming data platform. This will free up resources for the data team to invest more time in building competitive advantages.
Building a solid data foundation with Microsoft Fabric
Innovation in data must be built on a solid foundation. With this in mind, we recommend Microsoft Fabric. It's a compelling platform which we believe will inspire and drive development across industry.
Ready to explore the benefits of Microsoft Fabric for your organisation? Get in touch with our team to discuss how we can help you move forward.
