7 Considerations for Microsoft Fabric Adoption
Author: Tobin Thankachen | 5 min read | August 15, 2025
Summary
This article outlines seven essential considerations for organizations evaluating Microsoft Fabric. You will learn how to assess your data strategy, existing investments, platform compatibility, and cost implications before adopting the unified analytics platform.
Key Takeaways
- Understand how your business goals should shape your approach to analytics within Microsoft Fabric.
- Ensure your data quality and governance are ready for a unified analytics environment.
- Evaluate compatibility between Microsoft Fabric and your current data estate, including third-party platforms.
- Review existing investments in Power BI and Azure services to plan for seamless integration or migration.
- Assess cost factors related to compute and storage under Microsoft Fabric’s shared capacity model.
Are you evaluating Microsoft 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.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Microsoft Fabric, and how does it benefit organizations?
Microsoft Fabric is a unified analytics platform that combines various data services like Power BI, Data Engineering, and Data Science into one integrated solution, helping organizations simplify and optimize their analytics workflows.
How can I determine if Microsoft Fabric is right for my business?
Start by evaluating your business use cases, current data infrastructure, and existing analytics tools to see if Fabric’s capabilities align with your needs.
What kind of data quality is needed for Microsoft Fabric to be effective?
High-quality, well-governed data is crucial. Fabric will not correct poor data inputs—garbage in still results in garbage out.
Does Microsoft Fabric support third-party tools and data platforms?
Yes, it supports integration with many third-party and open-source platforms, though some features are limited or in preview.
How does Microsoft Fabric pricing work?
Costs are based on capacity units (CUs) for compute and OneLake usage for storage, offering shared compute for multiple services under a pay-as-you-go or reserved model.
