Most businesses are looking for ways to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and make data-driven decisions where possible. Analytics platforms have emerged as valuable tools in this pursuit, helping organisations of all sizes harness the power of their data.
Microsoft has introduced Microsoft Fabric, a comprehensive cloud-based solution that aims to simplify data analytics and help businesses extract meaningful insights from their information.
In this article, we provide an overview of Microsoft Fabric, its key features, and how it compares to a simpler reporting setup using an SQL database and Power BI, to help you determine if it is the right fit for your small or midsize organisation (25 to 500 employees).
What is Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end analytics platform designed to bring together all your data and analytics needs under one roof.
It is a cloud-based SaaS solution that integrates several Microsoft products and services, including Power BI, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Synapse Analytics. Think of Fabric as an umbrella over these individual components, providing a unified environment for data professionals and business users to collaborate on data projects.
It can start small, and can easily scale to an essentially unlimited amount of storage, even petabytes. That said, most small businesses do not have petabytes of analytics data, and often only a handful of gigabytes. This article explores the practicality of Fabric for small and medium businesses.
What is included in Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric offers a wide range of features that cater to different stages of the data analytics lifecycle. Here is a breakdown of some key features and how they are typically used:
Data Integration
Data Factory pipelines within Fabric enable businesses to ingest data from various sources, including databases, cloud storage, applications, and even competing cloud environments like Amazon S3. This eliminates the need to manually manage connections to each data source, saving time and resources. Small businesses can automate data collection from sources like website orders, marketing platforms, and accounting software, bringing all their data into a centralised location.
Data Engineering and Transformation
Fabric's Data Engineering tools, including Dataflows, allow users to visually design data transformation workflows, cleansing and preparing data for analysis. This feature enables less technical users to perform some data manipulation tasks, reducing reliance on IT specialists.
Data Warehousing and Lakehouse
Fabric uses a modern data storage model called OneLake, which combines the flexibility of data lakes with the structure of data warehouses. This approach allows businesses to store all their data, regardless of type or structure, in a single location cost-effectively, simplifying data management and enabling a variety of analytical workloads.
Data Analysis and Visualisation
Power BI, tightly integrated with Fabric, allows users to create interactive dashboards and reports that visualise insights from their data. Businesses can use Power BI's drag-and-drop interface and a library of visualisations to create compelling reports that communicate data effectively and support decision-making.
Data Science and Machine Learning
Synapse Data Science tools within Fabric provide capabilities for building and deploying machine learning models. This allows businesses to go beyond descriptive analytics and use predictive modelling to forecast future trends, identify patterns, and make proactive decisions.
Real-Time Analytics
Fabric's real-time analytics features enable businesses to process and analyse streaming data, providing up-to-the-minute insights. This is particularly valuable for applications that require immediate action based on real-time data, such as monitoring IoT devices (from vehicles or sensors deployed at customer sites), tracking website traffic, or managing inventory levels.
Data Governance and Security
Microsoft Purview integration within Fabric provides a centralised governance model, offering advanced data security, compliance, and consistent data management policies across the entire platform. This helps businesses maintain data quality, protect sensitive information, and meet regulatory requirements.
Fabric vs. a Simpler Setup: SQL Database and Power BI
A typical reporting setup alternative
The standard reporting setup for a smaller organisation generally consists of what we call a datamart, some integrations, and Power BI to collect, store, and analyse business data effectively.
An SQL datamart acts as a specialised repository for your business's critical data. Think of it as a well-organised warehouse where important information like sales transactions, customer details, and inventory records are stored. The data is structured in a way that makes it easy to access and analyse. This involves setting up tables that represent different aspects of your business, such as customers, products, and sales, and populating these tables with data from your various operational systems.
By centralising your data in an SQL datamart, you ensure that all your key information is housed in one place. This makes it easier to maintain data accuracy and consistency, which is important for generating reliable reports.
Data needs to flow into a datamart, and that is where integrations come in using PowerBI Dataflows. These can automate the process of integrating and preparing your data for analysis. Dataflows serve as a pipeline that continuously pulls data from your SQL datamart, cleans it, and makes it ready for reporting in Power BI. This means you can automatically update and refresh your data without manual intervention.
By using dataflows, you ensure that your reporting environment is always working with the latest data. This automation reduces the time spent on data preparation and minimises the risk of errors, allowing you to focus more on analysing the data and deriving insights.
Power BI is one of the most popular dashboarding tools used to visualise data and create interactive reports. It is sometimes included in your Microsoft 365 subscription, otherwise it can be purchased as an add-on licence separately for sharing reports around your organisation.
Once your data is prepared and stored in the SQL datamart, and continuously updated via dataflows, you can use Power BI to connect to this data and build visualisations. With Power BI, you can create various charts, graphs, and dashboards that provide insights into different aspects of your business. For example, you can track sales trends over time, monitor inventory levels, and analyse customer buying patterns.
Contrasting this with Microsoft Fabric
While a standalone SQL database paired with Power BI can serve as a capable reporting system, Microsoft Fabric offers several advantages, especially as your business needs become more complex:
Data Integration and Management: Connecting a SQL database to multiple data sources can become complex as your business grows. Fabric simplifies this process with Data Factory pipelines, providing a centralised approach to data integration.
Scalability and Flexibility: Scaling a standalone SQL database often requires manual infrastructure management. Fabric's cloud-based architecture allows for seamless scalability, automatically adjusting resources as your data volume grows.
Advanced Analytics and Data Science: A basic SQL database and Power BI setup primarily focuses on reporting and visualisation. Fabric provides dedicated tools for advanced analytics and data science, enabling you to go beyond basic reporting and extract deeper insights from your data.
Cost and Complexity: Managing separate infrastructure, licences, and integrations for a SQL database and Power BI can lead to hidden costs and complexities. Fabric consolidates these aspects with a single billing model and a unified platform, potentially simplifying administrative tasks and reducing overall costs.
Unified Governance and Security: Maintaining consistent data governance and security policies across separate systems can be challenging. Fabric's integration with Microsoft Purview (which comes at an additional cost, starting in the hundreds of dollars per month) ensures data security, compliance, and standardised data management practices across the entire platform.
Prebuilt Integrations
One of the strengths of Microsoft Fabric lies in its prebuilt integrations with various Microsoft and third-party services. Having these prebuilt makes it affordable and reliable to import data into your data platform.
That said, Microsoft appears to have started with the most popular integrations for enterprises and larger businesses. So although the list of integrations is long, it is not all-encompassing.
For small and midsized businesses, the typical tech stack includes a mix of CRMs, marketing systems, ERPs, eCommerce platforms, and specialty vertical applications such as legal platforms for lawyers or shipping and booking platforms for logistics providers.
While Microsoft has offered support in the past for applications such as Shopify and HubSpot via dataflows, at the time of writing (October 2024) these are not yet available in Fabric. There are some workarounds, and custom connectors can be created too. We would expect these integrations to be added to Fabric over time, but right now it is something to be aware of.
Pricing Comparison
Microsoft Fabric
For small and midsized businesses, Fabric is generally charged in two components: a compute allowance and PowerBI report sharing.
Compute
The smallest capacity (F2) costs around AUD $0.65 per hour, which works out to about AUD $500 per month, and can be paused when not in use. That said, as integrations tend to run on scheduled times and there is not yet a straightforward way to auto-start and shut down Fabric at predefined times, we would generally recommend organisations purchase a 12-month reservation upfront, as it offers a saving of around 40% over the year.
One caveat with the F2 capacity is that it is primarily designed for back-end data services, such as running a data warehouse and integrations. The smallest capacity required to publish a Power BI report is an F16, which is about AUD $5.00 per hour, or AUD $2,300 per month on a 12-month reservation. We would generally suggest budgeting for at least an F16 to start.
Power BI
The cost of sharing reports is the other main factor to consider with Fabric. While there is a free Power BI Desktop tool that anyone in your organisation can use for ad hoc data reporting, the moment they wish to share a report requires (a) a place to store the report and (b) a user with a Power BI licence to access the shared report.
The Fabric F16 capacity offers a place to store Power BI reports, so in most scenarios smaller businesses just need to count the number of people who need to access shared reports and purchase a Power BI Pro licence for them. Power BI Pro licences start at AUD $15 per month per user, and are also included with Microsoft 365 E5 plans.
One last point: the Fabric F64 capacity includes the reader licence for Power BI reports, so if you find you have only a handful of report creators but many report readers, the F64 could become a good option. At this level the Fabric Copilots become available for your data analysts to use, making it quicker for them to produce insights, which could result in a labour saving or reduced professional services cost.
Price comparison: simple reporting solution
By comparison, a simple reporting environment for a small or midsized business might comprise an SQL datamart (a serverless configuration on Azure could be under $100 per month) plus the required Power BI licences, and Azure Data Factory to help with the integrations (charged on usage, varies by workload). So these can be cost-effective to establish and keep running.
That said, immediately if you wish to bring in more advanced capabilities such as real-time reporting, AI, or data from less-structured sources (such as JSON feeds), then things can get complicated quickly and the costs to implement and support such an environment will add up. As an example, managed service providers might charge a few hundred dollars a month just to monitor the SQL database used for reporting, and as your needs grow it is possible many datamarts start to accumulate, causing costs to increase.
So from a pricing perspective, if your reporting requirements are straightforward, if you are happy to control all end-user permissions and access from Power BI, and your needs are expected to remain this way for the foreseeable future, then Fabric may be more than you need. But if you are looking for flexibility and scalability, it is often worth investigating Fabric more closely.
Conclusion
Microsoft Fabric offers a compelling solution for small and medium businesses seeking to harness the power of data analytics, with the caveat that not every integration is available out of the box.
Its unified platform, comprehensive features, and intuitive tools can help businesses gain valuable insights, improve decision-making, and drive growth.
For small and medium businesses, moving towards Fabric is generally a sound choice. It provides, in a practical sense, essentially unlimited scale and powerful features such as support for real-time data sources and AI that will continue to grow in the coming years.
However, it is important to consider your specific business needs, data volume, technical expertise, and budget before making a decision. The free trial offered by Microsoft provides a good opportunity to explore the platform's capabilities and determine if it is the right fit for your organisation.
If you are exploring other ways to use the Microsoft platform to improve productivity across your team, our AI Accelerate Workshop helps organisations identify practical AI use cases and build a prioritised roadmap. We also work with clients to understand their specific context before recommending solutions, ensuring the technology fits the business rather than the other way around.
Ready to explore your data platform options?
Choosing the right analytics setup depends on where your business is today and where it is heading. Whether Fabric is the right fit, or a simpler reporting environment makes more sense, we can help you work through the decision.