Technology

What Is Microsoft Fabric? A New Era for Finance, Data, and Planning

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Why Finance Leaders Should Pay Attention to Microsoft Fabric

If you lead an FP&A team, you’ve probably heard the name “Microsoft Fabric” by now whether from IT, in a planning platform demo, or while trying to keep up with Microsoft’s growing product universe. At first glance, it may sound like just another data tool. But it’s more than that. Microsoft Fabric is a foundational shift in how business data is connected, governed, and used across the enterprise.

Microsoft Fabric serves as a cohesive platform that unifies data tools, services, and sources, streamlining workflows and improving collaboration across the enterprise.

And finance leaders are right to pay attention.

A Simple Metaphor: The Airport for All Your Data

To understand Microsoft Fabric, think of your organization’s data like air traffic. In most companies, marketing flies in on one airline, finance flies in on another, HR shows up on a charter, and IT has its own runway. Each team manages its own schedules, planes, and passengers and nobody shares a gate.

Fabric is like building a central airport hub for all those flights. One runway, one control tower, one unified air traffic system. Every team still gets where they need to go, but now everyone operates from the same infrastructure, using the same rules, with shared security and visibility.

That’s what Microsoft Fabric does for your data. It brings together different data sources from across your organization into a single, unified environment, just like a central airport hub streamlines flights from many origins.

What Microsoft Fabric Actually Is

Microsoft Fabric is a unified platform for data engineering, analytics, and business intelligence. It brings together tools that used to be separate (like Power BI, Azure Synapse, Data Factory, and Data Lake) and combines them into a single, end-to-end platform. In addition to unifying these tools, Microsoft Fabric delivers robust data management capabilities, allowing organizations to organize, integrate, and control their data efficiently.

With Fabric, everything runs on OneLake, a shared data foundation. And everything is governed with the same security model across Microsoft 365, Azure, and Power BI. That means finance, operations, HR, sales, and IT can finally collaborate on data in one environment, without jumping between disconnected systems. Fabric offers a comprehensive suite of data and analytics tools, empowering both business and IT teams to manage, analyze, and gain insights from their data seamlessly.

For IT teams, Fabric simplifies the analytics stack. For business teams, it enables faster access to insights. And for finance leaders, fabric offers streamlined data management and analytics, resulting in fewer delays, fewer integration headaches, and more confidence in the numbers.

Why FP&A Teams Should Care

This matters because finance has never needed data more than it does now. Rolling forecasts, real-time variance analysis, and cross-functional planning require accurate, up-to-date, and connected data.

Unified data in Fabric can consolidate customer information from various systems, such as CRM platforms and databases, providing comprehensive insights for finance teams.

With Fabric:

  • Actuals, forecasts, and historicals live in a single, consistent data model
  • Reports in Power BI reflect live data, not stale exports, and allow teams to create reports efficiently
  • AI tools like Microsoft Copilot can generate insights from structured, governed data, and help finance teams analyze data across multiple sources, not from a patchwork of spreadsheets

In short, Fabric gives finance the foundation it needs to move from reactive reporting to proactive guidance. It turns data into something the finance team can trust, interact with, and build on.

Microsoft Fabric empowers finance teams to make data driven decisions by integrating analytics, AI, and real-time insights across all data sources.

How Kepion Uses Microsoft Fabric

Kepion is built natively on Microsoft technologies: SQL Server, Excel, Power BI, and now, Microsoft Fabric. That means when you use Kepion, you’re already using Fabric. You don’t need to rip out systems or rebuild your stack. Unlike traditional systems that require manual custom integrations, you just get seamless integration with Fabric and access to the latest Microsoft innovation as part of the platform.

Inside Kepion:

  • Planning models connect directly to data stored in Fabric, including integration with the data warehouse capabilities of Fabric
  • Kepion leverages data pipelines within Fabric to automate data movement and transformation, streamlining complex workflows
  • Reports and dashboards update live in Power BI
  • Forecasts, budgets, and scenarios use shared data definitions
  • Microsoft Copilot (when enabled) can query and explain your planning models directly

This isn’t a future roadmap. It’s what Kepion customers are using right now. Finance teams can build and maintain models on their own, while IT gets the transparency, control, and scalability that Fabric delivers behind the scenes.

Fabric Powers the Next Generation of Finance Tools

What’s especially exciting is how Microsoft Fabric unlocks new ways of working, not just better versions of old ones.

AI is the most obvious example. With Fabric as the foundation, platforms like Kepion can safely integrate AI tools that analyze trends, summarize variance explanations, or run scenario comparisons on demand. By leveraging AI to generate deeper data insights and integrating data science capabilities within Fabric for advanced analytics, organizations can unlock new levels of efficiency and understanding. Because the data is structured and governed, AI doesn’t just generate faster output, it generates better decisions.

Finance teams no longer need to request reports from IT or chase down data from eight different systems. Everything is connected. Everything is auditable. And everything is available in near real time. Fabric also enables real time analytics for finance teams, allowing immediate access to streaming data and insights for faster, more informed decision-making.

It’s Not Just for IT Anymore

The reality is, most finance leaders don’t need to know everything about Fabric’s technical architecture. But they do need to know that it’s becoming the standard for how modern businesses manage data.

If your organization already runs on Microsoft 365, uses Power BI, or has invested in Azure, then Fabric is already in the picture. Choosing tools that align with that ecosystem is a smart way to future-proof your finance stack. Fabric automates data movement and data ingestion across multiple sources, streamlining data pipelines and reducing the need for manual exports. This automation supports faster, more reliable data processing and real-time analytics.

With Kepion, you get all the benefits of Fabric without having to build it yourself. It’s already under the hood, powering your planning models, your dashboards, and your workflows, and leveraging OneLake as lake storage for all your organizational data.

Fabric can also integrate with tools like Google Sheets to further enhance productivity for finance teams.

Data Governance and Security: Protecting Your Financial Insights

For finance leaders, the integrity and security of financial data are non-negotiable. Microsoft Fabric places data governance and security at the heart of its unified data platform, ensuring that your most sensitive financial insights are always protected and accessible only to the right business users.

With Fabric, you gain a comprehensive data governance framework powered by Microsoft Purview. This means you can set clear data policies, monitor data access, and maintain full visibility across all your data sources—whether they come from ERP systems, CRM tools, or other financial databases. Microsoft Purview enables you to enforce access controls and data encryption, so your financial data remains secure both in transit and at rest.

The OneLake foundation of Fabric acts as a multi-cloud data lake, bringing all your data—regardless of origin—into a single, secure environment. This unified data platform allows finance professionals to analyze large volumes of data from various sources without the risk of data silos or fragmented information. With seamless integration powered by Azure Data Factory, you can bring data from different systems together, transforming raw data into actionable insights that drive informed decision making.

Fabric’s data integration capabilities don’t just eliminate manual intervention and back-and-forth between systems—they streamline workflows and empower finance teams to focus on what matters: extracting meaningful insights and enhancing decision making processes. By uniting all your data on one platform, you can leverage predictive analytics and machine learning tools to identify trends, spot opportunities, and mitigate risks in real time.

Adopting Microsoft Fabric means your finance data is not only unified and accessible, but also governed and protected at every step. Finance professionals can trust that their data is secure, their insights are reliable, and their decision making is backed by a robust, modern data platform. With Fabric, you’re equipped to unite data from various sources, analyze large volumes efficiently, and transform your financial planning with confidence—driving business growth and success in a data-driven world.

What’s Next for Finance on Microsoft Fabric?

We’re entering a phase where finance is expected to operate like a real-time function. Static budgets and lagging reports don’t cut it anymore. CFOs are expected to answer “what if” questions on demand, support decisions across the org, and deliver insights—not just numbers. Fabric enables finance teams to unify and analyze data from multiple sources, such as ERP and CRM systems, for better planning. With Microsoft Fabric, you can also transform data for more accurate and timely insights.

Microsoft Fabric makes that possible by supporting a variety of fabric workloads, including analytics, reporting, and data science. Data scientists can use Fabric to build and deploy advanced analytics models, working alongside other data team members to drive better business outcomes. And Kepion brings it to life for FP&A.

If you’re evaluating planning platforms or just wondering how to make the most of the Microsoft tools you already use, now is the time to take a closer look.

Want to see how Kepion and Microsoft Fabric work together in a real-world planning process?Book a demo and we’ll walk through it with your actual use case.

Frequently Asked Questions

Microsoft Fabric is a unified data and analytics platform built by Microsoft. It brings together tools for data engineering, data lakes, real-time analytics, business intelligence, and AI into one environment. For finance teams, that means less fragmentation, more real-time data access, and a stronger foundation for planning and forecasting.

OneLake is the central data lake inside Microsoft Fabric. It acts as a single, shared storage location for all business data across departments. Instead of having siloed data across systems, OneLake allows every team—from finance to sales to IT—to access and collaborate on the same source of truth.

Microsoft Fabric includes Power BI as one of its core components. That means all your analytics and dashboards are directly connected to the same data layer used for planning and forecasting. This eliminates the need to export data into separate tools and keeps your reporting live and consistent.

Fabric gives finance teams access to real-time data without waiting on IT or manually consolidating spreadsheets. With platforms like Kepion built on Fabric, finance can own planning, forecasting, and reporting in a secure and governed environment—while IT maintains control over data security and integrations.

No. You don’t need to know how to build pipelines or manage a data lake. But you should understand that Fabric is becoming the foundation for modern enterprise analytics, especially in Microsoft-based environments. Choosing a planning platform that’s already built on Fabric—like Kepion—means you benefit from the architecture without having to build it yourself.

Microsoft Copilot is an AI assistant built into Microsoft 365 tools like Excel, Power BI, and Teams. When your data lives in Fabric, Copilot can generate insights, answer planning questions, or help explain reports—because it has access to structured, governed data. In Kepion, Copilot can be used to ask questions directly about forecasts, variances, and trends.

Not exactly. Fabric builds on tools like Azure Synapse Analytics, Data Factory, and Power BI, combining them into a single platform. It simplifies the experience for users while retaining the power of each tool behind the scenes. For most organizations, Fabric is the next step in Microsoft’s analytics strategy—not a replacement, but a unification.

Kepion is built to run natively on Microsoft technologies, including SQL Server, Power BI, Excel, and now Microsoft Fabric. That means planning models, reports, and workflows in Kepion use the same data foundation and security controls as the rest of your Microsoft stack. You don’t need separate data connectors or duplicate logic—everything flows through one platform.

Yes, Fabric is already rolling out across Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem. Many organizations are already using parts of it through Power BI, Azure Synapse, or OneLake without realizing it. Kepion customers benefit from Fabric capabilities immediately, since the platform is built to integrate directly with Microsoft’s latest innovations.