Everyone knows there is immense value in developing insights and making decisions from your data, but anyone who is tasked with making that happen knows that it just isn’t that simple. Extracting data from your systems, storing it, and then analyzing it can require multiple systems each with their own licenses. It gets both complicated and expensive very quickly and that assumes that you have the technical skillsets to navigate these paths. To answer this problem, Microsoft has announced their own end-to-end analytics platform, Fabric.

 

Fabric sounds like a new marketing campaign for a bunch of existing Microsoft software.

While a lot of the functionality already exists, Fabric significantly improves the Microsoft data tech stack in two critical ways. First, it simplifies system administration and setup through automation. This means that the OneLake storage that is part of your Microsoft account is automatically ready and available without any setup. Previously, processing power needed to be manually allocated and warehouses needed to be spun up.  Second, Fabric reduces the technical barriers associated with extracting, storing, and analyzing your data. With low code and no code interfaces, non-technical users will be able to get their data out of source systems and ready for analysis efficiently.

What’s Included?

  • Data Factory: Connect to a wide range of source systems and load data into Fabric
  • Data Engineering: Transform data at scale using advanced, distributed computing
  • Data Science: Explore and enrich data with machine learning models through collaborative notebooks
  • Data Warehouse: Store all of your data in one place using flexible architecture that dynamically scales to meet your needs
  • Real Time Analytics: Consume and analyze high velocity data efficiently, so insights are gained immediately rather than waiting for batch processing
  • Power BI: Present and distribute your data in an interactive format that gets the data to the individuals who need to use it 
  • Data Activator: Monitor what is happening in the data and trigger a wide-range of responses based on established thresholds, including e-mails or other automated processes

 

 

Is Fabric a good fit for me?

Companies that are already using Microsoft’s analytic offerings such as Power BI or Azure storage are going to see benefits from Fabric immediately. Using OneLake to store organizational data allows all users to access the data from one location instead of creating their own copies in multiple locations.  With Fabric, Power BI can query data directly from OneLake without the need to download it. Not sure how you can get your data from your systems to Fabric? There are already over 150 pre-built connectors in Data Factory and many platforms are already working with Microsoft to build dedicated connectors for their software. Examples of dedicated connectors include Salesforce (CRM), Databricks (Data Infrastructure), and Asana (Project Management) and are already available. These are just a few of the exciting features of Fabric and there are dozens more that could be driving value and efficiency for you in the future.

 

 

Let’s get started together!

Whether you’re just starting to think about your data strategy or already have established infrastructure, AMEND is ready to work with you to get to your next milestone. Our team has experience that spans the full technology lifecycle from system selection through deployment. If you’re curious about how Fabric fits into your business, please reach out.

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