Have you faced challenges to identify and secure the continuously evolving data estate and engineering solutions and don’t know how to solve them? Your problem has been heard, and now you can start mitigating them by combining the broad data engineering capabilities provided in Microsoft Fabric solution and easily approachable Data Security functionalities of Microsoft Purview solution. By reading this blog, you can learn the overview of Microsoft Fabric and how to secure your data with Purview’s enhanced data security solutions. You won’t be getting an information overflow, it only takes a few moments of your time to start reducing risks that your organization might be facing.

What is Microsoft Fabric and for what purposes it can be used?

Microsoft Fabric is a data and end-to-end Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) analytics platform designed for enterprise use. With Fabric, your organization can leverage a wide variety of data handling tasks that require a unified solution. It offers a wide suite of services including Data Engineering, Data Factory, Real-time analytics, just a name a few. You don’t need to assemble different services with different vendors. Instead, you can use Fabric’s integrated, user-friendly platform to fill your data analytics working needs. It integrates separate components into the unified stack, and instead of relying on multiple different databases or data warehouses, you can centralize data storage with OneLake solution. All of this is collected under one solution, and not scattered around your infrastructure.

Fabric integrates workloads such as Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Science, Real-time intelligence, Industry solutions and PowerBI into a shared foundation. Each of these services is tailored for user roles such as data engineers, data scientists or data warehouse professionals and they serve a specific task. The Fabric solution has AI integration, and it helps you to accelerate your data journey.

No matter what your organization’s industry might be – unifying the data engineering solutions is the first crucial step towards better governance and security. Data leaks and their publicity is not something that you want to face.

The benefits of leveraging Microsoft Purview’s capabilities for Microsoft Fabric

You can easily go further by managing your organization’s data located in Microsoft Fabric with Purview’s unified governance and security capabilities. With Purview’s unmatched Security and Compliance capabilities, you can employ advanced, estate-wide security for all your data located in Microsoft Fabric. 

You can seamlessly secure your data to reduce risks by:

• Identifying sensitive data in Fabric with built in labeling
• Detect possible risky user activity in Fabric with Insider Risk signals
• Prevent sensitive data loss by applying Data-Loss Prevention (DLP) policies

You can also confidently activate the data to help your business to create value by:

• Managing access and data quality on products containing Fabric data
• Track Fabric items and their lineage in Purview’s Data Catalog
• Curate data across different business domains and data products

Enforcing regulatory and compliance requirements are crucial in current regulatory tsunami. Therefore, you can:

• Audit logs for Fabric integration to aid in investigations
• Implement regulatory controls across the data estate with Compliance Manager
• Govern your records with Purview’s Data Lifecycle Management

Key points for managing & securing your data estate

With the Microsoft Fabric admin portal, your organization’s administrators can manage everything related to Microsoft Fabric. This includes adjusting settings that affect the entire solution. For example, admins can change tenant settings, manage different areas like capacities, domains, and workspaces, and control how users interact with the platform. To make things easier, some administrative tasks can be delegated to specific areas, so the respective admins can handle them within their scope.

To make sure that your data stays safe, and is compliant with privacy and regulatory requirements, you can use sensitivity labels from Microsoft Purview Information Protection. These labels, combined with Fabric’s built-in features, allow you to tag your organization’s data either manually or automatically. Purview Audit then tracks and records all activities in Fabric, such as accessing Lakehouse, Power BI, Spark, data factory activities, and logins.

Using Microsoft Purview’s Data-loss Prevention policies for Fabric, you can automatically identify sensitive information when it’s uploaded into your Fabric tenant. Administrators can get audit logs for every DLP detection, giving them better insight into critical data and its location. They can set up alerts to be automatically triggered whenever sensitive information is detected. Additionally, they can create custom messages to guide users on handling sensitive data. For example, admins could configure a message to be sent to the Fabric data owner whenever proprietary information is detected, explaining that this information is internal and shouldn’t be shared externally.

We are more than happy to help you!

Contact us for to get started with our Microsoft Purview workshop product. In the workshop, we can help you to map out responsibilities, defining the security baseline for Microsoft Fabric and start the relevant governance and data security actions. This workshop product outlines the steps to get started with integrating Microsoft Purview into your Fabric solution and start protecting the data estate against security risks.

We can also provide training for Microsoft Purview use, which includes comprehensive guidance for the use of whole Purview solution and its integration capabilities with different solutions – including Microsoft Fabric and Databrics.