How Microsoft Fabric is Making Data Platforms Smarter

Every digital journey starts with a unified data platform

A decade ago, the data landscape was highly fragmented. Organisations relied on separate solutions for computing, storage, data warehousing, and business intelligence, each requiring its own setup and maintenance.

Integrating these disparate systems—ensuring seamless data flow, governance, and scalability—was a complex and resource-intensive task. Adding AI capabilities only compounded these challenges, requiring additional tools and considerations. This fragmented approach was not only costly but also time-consuming, diverting data teams from their core objective: delivering meaningful business insights.

While technology has evolved, one truth remains: getting the foundation right is still critical. A modern data platform must be scalable, well-governed, and AI-ready from the start to unlock true business value. That is where Microsoft Fabric comes in. Designed as a Unified Data Platform, Fabric simplifies this complexity by bringing together storage, processing, management, and AI capabilities into one seamless solution.

Delivered as a SaaS platform, it unites powerful services such as Data Engineering, Data Factory, Real-Time Analytics, Data Warehouse, and—at its heart—Power BI. This integration empowers everyone, from analysts to executives, with fast, trusted insights to fuel their digital journey.

Why Microsoft Fabric stands out in the AI age

In an era where AI is increasingly central to business operations, a reliable data foundation is vital. Microsoft Fabric enhances its unified design to address the needs of this AI-driven landscape, providing tools that improve data usability and accessibility.

Starting with OneLake, Fabric’s unified data lake, it connects an organisation’s multi-cloud and on-premises data estate into a single location, enabling teams to manage and access it efficiently. This consistency accelerates AI projects by providing a unified, comprehensive data foundation—think sales, inventory, and customer data combined for more accurate forecasting—while also supporting governance and security for sensitive information.

Additionally, Copilot, an AI-driven assistant integrated into Fabric, assists users by suggesting improvements—such as refining queries or organising data—and automating tasks, such as report preparation. This helps analysts and data professionals focus on more critical work. Fabric also offers AI Skills, currently in public preview, enabling users to create tailored AI solutions, such as document analysis with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or object detection for spotting production issues.

With mirroring or the new built-in Azure SQL Database, transactional data—such as recent sales or customer updates—flows directly into OneLake, ready for Fabric’s analytics tools to process. This supports AI features, such as keeping RAG current, so a retailer can track purchase patterns, or a support team can review the latest feedback with ease.

Fabric’s Real-Time Intelligence adds another layer, designed for AI applications that depend on up-to-the-second data. It is particularly useful for cases such as fraud detection, where banks can monitor transactions as they happen, or predictive maintenance, where manufacturers can analyse live sensor data from equipment to spot wear trends and schedule repairs before a breakdown disrupts production. This capability ensures organisations can act quickly and confidently, whether they are protecting revenue or maintaining operations.

FabCon 2025: A sneak peek at what’s next

At the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference (FabCon) 2025, held from 31st March to 2nd April in Las Vegas, Microsoft unveiled a suite of transformative updates that solidify Fabric’s position as an enterprise-grade, AI-ready unified data platform. With more than 25,000 organisations onboard and 67% of Fortune 500 companies leveraging Fabric to empower their data teams today, Microsoft continues to demonstrate Fabric’s enterprise readiness with exciting and eagerly awaited features.

Starting with OneLake Security, a transformative breakthrough in data security within OneLake. It centralises security control within Fabric’s entire ecosystem, ensuring access policies are defined once and applied consistently across all engines. The magic here is enforcement. OneLake Security ties these policies to the data itself: whether someone is running queries against a Lakehouse’s SQL analytics endpoint or browsing through a Power BI report, they will only see what they are authorised for.

Moreover, Purview Data Loss Prevention in Fabric has been expanded to include support for new data sources—KQL and mirrored databases—helping organisations protect sensitive information such as financial data, credit card numbers, and National Insurance numbers. This enhancement allows security administrators to detect uploads of such data and automatically trigger protective actions to prevent unauthorised sharing.

Additional enhancements were announced that bring full CI/CD support across the platform, including the introduction of variable libraries for workspaces, service principal support for GitHub, and deployment pipelines for Fabric APIs (Phase II). This empowers teams to enhance their workflows and accelerate delivery cycles.

Meanwhile, their vision of unifying data ecosystems becomes even more compelling by enabling users to create shortcuts to multi-cloud sources—including Amazon S3, S3-compatible storage, and Google Cloud Platform—as well as on-premises data hosted behind firewalls or Virtual Private Clouds. This eliminates the need for complicated middleware or gateway solutions, bridging the gap between cloud and local environments with plug-and-play simplicity for effective and secure integration.

How Hitachi Solutions leverages Microsoft Fabric

At Hitachi Solutions, Microsoft Fabric serves as the foundation for building rapid, high-impact data solutions. For instance, we have used Fabric to develop minimum viable products (MVPs) and proofs of concept (PoCs) at remarkable speed. Rather than provisioning a complex array of Azure resources, Fabric’s all-in-one workloads—ingestion, transformation, analytics, and visualisation—allow us to quickly build and test data platforms.

Retailers benefit immensely from Microsoft Fabric’s ability to tackle the complexities of modern commerce. It unifies fragmented data from silos such as product catalogues, sales channels, and customer behaviours into a single, accessible platform. With unified storage, scalable computing power, and built-in AI tools, retailers can uncover why sales shift or how trends emerge. Real-time analytics enables them to monitor and respond to these changes as they happen, while Power BI delivers actionable, real-time insights to act on those findings—empowering retailers to stay agile and competitive in a fast-moving market.

A perfect illustration of Microsoft Fabric’s power is our work with END. Clothing is a British retailer known for premium streetwear and exclusive collaborations. As rapid growth outpaced its legacy systems, END. faced fragmented data and manual Excel bottlenecks that slowed decision-making. Partnering with Hitachi Solutions, we optimised their Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment and deployed Fabric to unify their data and analytical workflows. The result? Faster, reliable insights—eliminating delays and paving the way for AI-driven innovation as END. scales globally.

Kickstart your data transformation now

The potential of Microsoft Fabric to transform your data strategy is clear, but knowing where to start can be challenging. At Hitachi Solutions, we bring unrivalled expertise across Microsoft’s entire stack of technical solutions, with a 100% focus on Microsoft technologies.

Our experienced advisors will collaborate with you to craft a strategic roadmap, ensuring a smooth transition and seamless integration of Microsoft Fabric as it evolves—unlocking smarter, AI-driven insights across your operations.

Supported by our technical experts, who specialise in optimising Fabric’s capabilities, we will empower your business to stay ahead in a dynamic, data-driven world. Partner with Hitachi Solutions to align Microsoft Fabric with your unique data needs.

Contact us today.