We believe that the role of the Data Platform within an organisation is evolving, particularly with the introduction of Fabric as a service. A data platform is no longer just there to provide advanced reporting and analytic capabilities. Now it should be seen as:
• The central hub of the organisation.
• All systems feed data in and extract as needed to remain up to date.
• Reporting and Analytics are just one of multiple workloads available. Other workloads include:
• Data integrations, all systems feed in and share data to feed downstream to other systems as needed.
• Data Science, Ability to supply and curate data to AI / ML applications.
• Support Data Governance / Management activities – e.g. seen by integration of Microsoft Fabric with Purview
• Data Discovery activities.
• Supply of data to 3rd Parties.

Why you should be considering the use of Microsoft Fabric?
Latest iteration of the Microsoft Data Platform: Historically Microsoft’s data platform was based around SQL Server, data warehousing principles (e.g. Kimball) and the use of OLAP based analytic technologies.  This was all on-premise and changed with the introduction of Cloud technologies.  Overall whilst the platforms delivered great value, the on-premise approach:
• Was expensive in terms of infrastructure which you had to provision, upgrade, manage and decommission.
• Suffered from a flexibility paradox. Whilst the outputs of Data Warehouses and especially OLAP based technologies (such as Analysis Services) where incredibly flexible, the applications were extremely inflexible in terms of data ingest.  It was costly to store and process data, so anything not needed wasn’t included. This forced a design where, despite the outputs of data platforms being very flexible, inputs into data platforms were inherently inflexible and unlikely to change.
• Originally hard to integrate data sources that weren’t also on-premise, in recent times tooling has got better here.

Cloud provided exceptionally cheap storage and on-demand compute power and combined this changed the way data could be ingested, stored and processed.  Data Modelling was (and is) still critically important, but with Cloud we can ingest as much data as we liked and then process it for different workloads, previously this was extremely expensive from an infrastructure perspective. Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) routines became Extract, Load, Transform (ELT). Rather than only extract and transform what we need, we now extract and load everything, transforming when we need to conscious that we’ve already got all the data. With this change in mindset a new generation of tooling was created which culminated in the Platform As A Service offering known as Azure Synapse Analytics.  This combined a new set of tools including Spark, Databricks, Azure Data Lake, Azure Data Factory to produce “Data Lake House” environments which were hugely scalable yet much cheaper to run in practice.  Synapse alongside Power BI (a SAAS tool) became very quickly the default platform for Microsoft Cloud based Analytics.  Fabric is latest iteration and addresses a number of points about the combination of Synapse and Power BI, these are:
• Fabric is a pure SAAS product rather than combination of PAAS (Synapse, Azure Data Lake, Azure Data Factory) and SAAS (Power BI).  With Fabric there is no platform infrastructure to provision and manage, it’s all done for you

• Simplified tooling – Fabric streamlines the developer experience.  Previously there were multiple logins to different toolsets (e.g. Data Factory, Power BI), now it’s one single environment.  Data Factory, Notebooks, Power BI, Data Flows Gen2, Data Lake – all in the one place.

• Tighter DevOps integration for more streamlined source control and releases.

• Simplified licencing.  Fabric has one licence cost for the core services (e.g. One Lake, Data Factory, etc.) rather than separate items.  It is possible to start on the smaller SKUs and scale as required.

• Tight integration with Power BI.  Power BI is now part of Microsoft Fabric.  Whilst still licenced separately for lower price SKUs, Power BI is very tightly integrated into the Fabric suite of products. This makes it easier to get data into and publish reporting through Power BI.

• Continuous innovation from Microsoft since it’s initial release in 2023.  Microsoft have publicly stated that whilst Synapse and on-premise data platforms will continue to be supported and in some scenarios enhanced, all of their investment will now be in Fabric.  There have been monthly releases of new features, bug fixes since initial preview release last year.  Fabric went into general release in Nov 2023.  “One Lake” below is part of this.

• Shortcuts and “One Lake” – this is a new feature only available in Fabric.  “One Lake” is a new concept that spans all of your Fabric workspaces and means that as soon as the data is in the Lake it’s available to all processing capabilities, subject to normal access controls. A new feature called “Short Cuts” can create dynamic links to other cloud provider data stores (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud) and Microsoft is investing heavily in replicating their own software data store (e.g. Dynamics / Azure SQL) into the Lake. This all means it’s much easier in theory to ingest data into the Lake for processing.

• Connectivity to other Microsoft applications.  Microsoft has always been very strong in getting its tooling / products to talk to each other.  For organisations centring on Microsoft as the main vendor it is much simpler to get Microsoft tooling to work together than use of say Microsoft and Oracle. DataVerse for example now “shortcuts” directly into OneLake.

• Skills and Support.  Already there is an extensive community for Microsoft Fabric and comprehensive documentation and training from Microsoft.   Locally, the Channel Islands as a jurisdiction is very heavily Microsoft focused and it is more straightforward to get support than again, say Oracle or AWS.