There’s no question that success and advancement in every industry today depends on data. As part of other, ongoing digital transformation initiatives, uncovering data’s power and potential often represents more hurdles for organizations that operate with disparate data silos, or teams that must rely on IT to build dashboards and reports that uncover insights too late to gain an edge on the competition.  

Microsoft Fabric offers an all-in-one platform that simplifies the integration and utilization of data for insights and innovation, encompassing everything from data movement and data science to real-time analytics and business intelligence. It ensures organizations have a robust foundation for AI and ML capabilities while maintaining business value. Incorporating both new and existing elements like Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Factory into tailored user experiences, Fabric also operationalizes and harmonizes data sources and workloads through a centralized SaaS foundation, enhancing data reliability and access. This approach not only democratizes data, allowing for quicker, deeper insights, but also enables users to focus on their mission-critical objectives without needing to delve into the technicalities of the infrastructure.

By activating Microsoft Fabric, your organization can  build a solid foundation for AI and ML capabilities.

Is Your Organization Ready for Fabric?

The 2010s were marked as the era of Big Data gathering, where organizations focused on amassing vast amounts of data. However, the 2020s have ushered in a new era – the era of data-fueled business and the digital economy. As artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities further allow every industry to action all their data and uncover insights humans cannot, one-stop-shop tools like Microsoft Fabric put essential, real-time data in the hands of every employee, empowering everyone to make data-informed decisions and innovate, no matter their role or tech-savviness.  

Tools like Microsoft Fabric have emerged as one-stop solutions, placing essential, real-time data in the hands of every employee, regardless of their role or technical expertise. With Fabric, organizations can empower their workforce to make data-informed decisions and drive innovation across the board. By democratizing access to data and leveraging the power of AI and ML, Fabric enables organizations to fuel their digital transformation and propel them into the future.

The Next Step in your Digital Transformation Journey

IDC research conducted in Q3 2022 revealed that AI adoption increased three times since 2019, and 50% of survey respondents planned to use AI across business functions in 2023. Global spending on AI is set to exceed $301 billion by 2026, achieving a CAGR of more than 26%. As your organization’s journey evolves to incorporate AI and ML, aligning your data strategy with your business strategy and mission-critical priorities becomes more important than ever before.

No matter your industry, one of the first questions to ask before considering a new data solution is, “What do we want to build and achieve with our data?” Now consider one of the most common stumbling blocks organizations have been forced to navigate while undergoing digital transformation: disparate data sources and stores. Microsoft Fabric ushers in a modern data platform structure, representing a paradigm shift in how organizations access and use their data or uncover insights.

AI isn’t Going Away

Constructing a solid foundation for later AI/ML initiatives can help forward-looking organizations gain a competitive edge. Microsoft Fabric provides unfettered access to data, strong computing and processing power, built-in analytics and engineering capabilities that allow teams to visualize and operationalize data or models.

“The concept here is very new,” says Eric Wozniak, Enterprise Sales Director at 3Cloud. “The organizations that are going to adopt this in the short term are trailblazers. They’ve done the risk-reward calculation, and it’s worth it to them because of the capabilities, the business value, and getting an early lead on their competitors.”

Establish Data Governance

Data governance refers to the ongoing efforts required for the success of all data management and usage disciplines, including data management, ownership, security, privacy, architecture, integration, warehousing, data lakes, and business intelligence. A data governance program ensures an organization can handle data-related issues while ensuring compliance with policies and requirements.

3Cloud’s data governance methodology features five proven competencies or pillars that serve as the backbone of their framework, allowing organizations to streamline assessment and effectively manage related implementations. Take the assessment today.

Integrate the data. Govern the data. You need to put policies, reporting and compliance around what you’re doing with your data to ensure you’re following legal and geographic requirements, encryption, and security. And you must keep all these pieces in mind when you’re thinking through your data strategy.

Promote a Data-First Culture

Not every organization has achieved a data-first mindset among employees, particularly where self-service analytics has yet to be adopted or deployed. Achieving a data-first mindset across an organization can be a significant challenge. In many cases, self-service analytics tools have yet to be widely adopted or deployed, leading to a concentration of data-intensive work in the hands of a few overworked analysts. Take the marketing organization, for example, where critical day-to-day success heavily relies on the efforts of a small team responsible for building Power BI dashboards in collaboration with IT and marketing operations.

Time to insight is delayed, as is business responsiveness when a problem or challenge is uncovered too late. This bottleneck often results in a lack of responsiveness when problems or challenges arise. Businesses are left playing catch-up, unable to make timely data-informed decisions. However, as organizations mature and cultivate a data-first culture, decision-making processes can be significantly accelerated.

To foster this culture, organizations must actively seek out and hire data scientists, architects, and engineers – roles that are in high demand and short supply. Competition for these talents remains fierce, as businesses across industries recognize the invaluable contributions these professionals can make. By prioritizing the development of a data-first mindset and investing in the necessary expertise, organizations can overcome the hurdles that currently impede their ability to leverage data effectively.

Communicate Fabric’s Value to Stakeholders

When making the case to deploy Fabric, emphasize key points that help everyone understand the platform’s potential to solve customers, employees, partners and suppliers’ unmet needs, and ease adoption.

Emphasize Fabric’s Key Advantages

While some organizations have successfully harnessed and leveraged their data, the majority are still struggling to realize the true business value of their data investments. Despite significant financial commitments to data and analytics initiatives, many companies are falling short in empowering their employees with the necessary tools and resources to make strategic, data-driven decisions.

A recent study by the Harvard Business Review revealed a startling statistic: only 20% of organizations are effectively equipping their workforce with the means to leverage data for strategic decision-making. This disconnect between investment and tangible results highlights a fundamental challenge companies are grappling with.

Historically, the management of AI/ML and data science initiatives has been siloed within separate divisions or departments, often functioning in isolation from traditional data warehouse teams. This fragmented approach has led to ongoing challenges in ensuring that the right data reaches the appropriate teams in a timely and accessible manner, further compounding the issue of data accessibility and utilization.

Microsoft Fabric offers a streamlined solution to this problem, unifying data management and analytics under a single platform. By consolidating these functions under one roof, Fabric enables seamless collaboration and data sharing across business and data functions that previously operated in silos.

Not only can the many business and data functions that frequently work with the same data now use the same platform for their work, but they can also easily share their work product or results. 

Out-of-the-box Governance

With Fabric, there is no infrastructure to set up or manage. Any data that is consumed into OneLake, Fabric’s unified data layer, automatically inherits a suite of out-of-the-box data governance capabilities, including data lineage tracking, data protection measures, certification, and catalog integration.

While all data ultimately falls under the control of a centralized tenant administration, Fabric empowers different business groups to collaborate seamlessly or work independently without the need for a central gatekeeper. This flexible approach promotes agility and efficiency, enabling teams to access and leverage data assets according to their specific requirements.

With Microsoft Purview (included in Fabric), organizations can establish robust data governance and security measures to ensure data integrity and compliance. Purview Information Protection allows admins to apply sensitivity labels across Fabric content, which are visible and inherited as data moves through the environment. 

By providing a comprehensive and automated data governance framework, Microsoft Fabric eliminates the complexities and silos that have traditionally hindered organizations in the past. Companies can now focus on leveraging their data assets to drive business value, secure in the knowledge that robust governance and security measures are in place, ensuring data integrity, compliance, and controlled access across the entire organization.

Powerful Processing and AI Readiness

Streamlined access and governance lay a solid foundation for AI and ML capabilities. Users can explore and visualize data easily, making it simpler to identify patterns and trends and leverage advanced analytics techniques such as predictive modeling and machine learning.

Generative AI-powered features like Copilot enable teams to quickly resolve challenges or problems, generate solutions, and create dramatic visualizations and reports that can be easily shared. Fabric offers high performance for processing large volumes of data in real-time and simplified data ingestion capabilities. Just as anyone can easily create reports with Power BI, every Fabric user can create unified data acquisition pipelines, build machine learning models, and scale solutions.

Improved Technology and Simplified Pricing

Fabric’s robust set of included features and tools eliminate the need for organizations to purchase or manage separate products and licenses. Organizations are assured they’re using the latest, most up-to-date versions of tools like Power BI.

Fabric also helps businesses gain control over data storage, processing, and analytics costs. Pay-as-you-go Fabric Capacity offers a shared pool of capacity that powers all Fabric capabilities, from data modeling and warehousing to BI and AI experiences. Fabric Capacity’s simplified pricing allows organizations to purchase a single pool of compute for every workload and use the same set of Capacity Units wherever there’s a need, without having to pre-allocate capacity. Transparent monitoring through a centralized dashboard allows teams to monitor usage and costs.

Empower Every Data-Focused Team

Modern organizations should understand how a modern data platform can drive their analytics and insights, and all that powerful, real-time insights enable teams to achieve.

“Where I see Fabric having a lot of success is in what I call ‘departmental implementations,'” says David Tyler, Senior Director of Data, Analytics and AI at 3Cloud. “Especially within larger enterprise organizations, business lines tend to act almost like their own operating companies, if you will. They have their own way of doing things, they have their own structures, they have their own rules. And where Fabric is extremely powerful is that it allows them to have that compartmentalized perspective, but still be a part of the enterprise. They’re still leveraging a proper solution from an enterprise perspective, but they’re able to focus and home in on a departmental goal or a departmental need and satisfy that need in the context of the enterprise. Fabric is great at that. It’s a departmental enabler. I can go into the finance department or the sales department or the operations or supply chain, and I can implement Fabric and customize it in four different ways, but it’s still Fabric.”

Microsoft Fabric offers More for Data-Intensive Work

  • Data Engineering: Data engineers build and configure platforms to make use of organizational data at scale. While they typically work in Python to build data flow, Fabric’s low-code interfaces like Data Flows and Data Pipelines ease data engineering workloads. Data Factory, Synapse Data Warehouse, Synapse Data Engineering, and Synapse Real-Time Analytics are each available within Fabric to advance and empower data engineering and visually integrate data from every connected source.
  • Data Science: Data scientists model, map, and transform data with Synapse Data Science and readily write AI-enhanced code with Copilot. Machine learning experimentation can be stood up handily.
  • Data Warehousing: Fabric enables teams to connect data sources and deliver a single data foundation — OneLake — consistently, across all workloads, ensuring intelligence flows where people work.
  • Data Storytelling and Wireframing: On the analytics engineering side, Power BI enables teams to transform data to insight, visualize key insights, and ensure end-users can effectively understand and leverage organizational data to improve and transform the business or achieve departmental objectives. Fabric allows these teams to bring together more datasets and enable deeper, faster insights through Synapse Data Warehouse, Power BI, and Data Activator.
  • Data Stewards: Auditing, classifying, and securing data becomes an easier task thanks to Purview, Fabric’s data encryption, and Microsoft Information Protection. Security and access layers allow administrators to readily define and control access, and Fabric’s workspaces further isolate users from data that should not be available to them. Fabric enables IT and cybersecurity teams to provide high availability and more deftly manage disaster recovery and data loss prevention.

Conclusion

Cloud-based business intelligence offers organizations access to data analysis from anywhere at any time, with unmatched freedom, scalability and cost-effectiveness. Microsoft Fabric takes that ease- of-use even further, combining SaaS convenience with AI-enhanced capabilities that can uncover hidden patterns, improve decision-making and much more. 3Cloud’s experts can help you not only determine how to integrate AI to transform your business, but also understand how tools like Fabric will transform how your organization leverages data to innovate and differentiate against your competitors. Get started today.