7 Considerations for Microsoft Fabric Adoption

Are you evaluating Microsoft Fabric’s potential for your organization? Here are 7 key factors to keep in mind while you consider your options.

1. What Do You Want to Do with Your Data?

It doesn’t matter how many analytics services are included in one platform if you don’t have a clear idea of what insights you want to get from your data. Start with your business use cases to determine the stakeholders, data, processes, and policies involved.

2. Do You Have a High-Quality Data Foundation?

The garbage in, garbage out principle applies to data analytics. You need to ensure that the data moving into Fabric is high-quality.

3. What’s Your Plan for Ongoing Data Governance in Microsoft Fabric?

Data governance is not a one-and-done process. Without the right data strategy, you’ll end up with poor-quality data impacting your data-driven insights.

4. What Existing Analytics Investments Do You Have?

Microsoft Fabric seamlessly integrates with existing Microsoft analytics products, such as Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics. Organizations that have already invested in these solutions can leverage their existing investments and expertise while benefiting from the unified platform. Also, ask yourself what you plan to do with redundant solutions.

Microsoft has stated that some features will be Fabric-exclusive, so you may face a potential future migration. If you’re using several Azure solutions included in Fabric, the unified solution may also offer cost-savings due to shared capacity.

5. Is Your Current Data Estate Compatible with Microsoft Fabric?

While Microsoft Fabric offers a comprehensive set of native capabilities, it also supports integration with third-party solutions and open-source technologies. However, your current data platforms may not be in that list yet. For example, Mirroring in Fabric is a capability that supports continuous replication into OneLake from Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB and Snowflake, but as of this writing, this is a feature that is in preview.

6. Do You Have the Right Microsoft Fabric Resources Available?

Adopting a new analytics platform may require upskilling, training for existing teams, hiring new headcount, and/or working with a trusted Microsoft Solutions Partner to bring in the necessary skill sets.

7. Microsoft Fabric Costs Compared to Your Existing Data Estate

Rather than provisioning and managing separate compute for each workload, with Microsoft Fabric, your bill uses two variables: the provisioned compute, measured in capacity units (CUs), and the OneLake storage used, measured in GB per month. Compute is charged pay-as-you-go or in 1-year reservations, while storage is pay-as-you-go.

The shared capacity of the CUs covers the compute for Data Warehouse, Data Integration, Data Science, Data Engineering, Real-Time Analytics, Power BI, Data Activator, and Copilot. You do not need to pre-allocate CUs, and all CUs get pooled together and not locked to an idle workload. Microsoft Fabric offers a centralized dashboard for usage and cost monitoring.

Each capability, such as Power BI, Spark, Data Warehouse, with the associated queries, jobs, or tasks has a unique consumption rate. Evaluating the potential costs of Microsoft Fabric compared to your current data estate and analytics platform is critical.

Learn more about your potential Microsoft Fabric journey in our latest white paper, “Microsoft Fabric Essentials and Adoption Considerations.”