Microsoft Fabric for Small Business: Do You Need It?
It’s fair to say most businesses generally are on the lookout for ways to streamline their operations, improve efficiency, and make data-driven decisions where possible. Analytics platforms have emerged as valuable tools in this pursuit, helping businesses of all sizes to harness the power of their data.
Microsoft has recently introduced Microsoft Fabric, a comprehensive cloud-based solution that aims to simplify data analytics and empower businesses to extract meaningful insights from their information.
In this article I 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’s the right fit for your small or midsize organisation (25-500 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’s 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 essentially an unlimited amount of storage, even petabytes.
That said, most small businesses don’t have petabytes of analytics data, and often only a handful of gigabytes - so this article explores the practicality of Fabric for small and medium businesses.
What’s included in Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric offers a wide range of features that cater to different stages of the data analytics lifecycle. Here’s a breakdown of some key features and how they are typically used:
Data Integration: Data Factory pipelines within Fabric enable businesses to seamlessly ingest data from various sources, including databases, cloud storage, applications, and even Microsoft’s competitor 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 centralized 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 empowers less technical users to perform some amount of data manipulation tasks, reducing reliance on IT specialists.
Data Warehousing and Lakehouse: Fabric leverages 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 very cost effectively, simplifying data management and enabling a variety of analytical workloads.
Data Analysis and Visualization: Power BI, tightly integrated with Fabric, allows users to create interactive dashboards and reports that visualize insights from their data. Businesses can leverage Power BI’s drag-and-drop interface and a library of visualizations 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 leverage predictive modeling to forecast future trends, identify patterns, and make proactive decisions.
Real-Time Analytics: Fabric's real-time analytics features enable businesses to process and analyze 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 (such as 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 centralized 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 and well-organised reporting setup alternative
The standard reporting setup for a smaller sized organisations generally consists of what we call a datamart, some integrations, and Power BI to collect, store, and analyze business data effectively.
An SQL datamart acts as a specialized repository for your business’s critical data. Think of it as a well-organized 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 analyze. 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 centralizing your data in an SQL datamart, you ensure that all your key information is housed in one place. This centralization makes it easier to maintain data accuracy and consistency, which is crucial for generating reliable reports.
That said, 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.
Essentially, dataflows serve as a simple pipeline that continuously pulls data from your SQL datamart, cleans it, and makes it ready for reporting in PowerBI. This means that 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 minimizes the risk of errors, allowing you to focus more on analyzing the data and deriving insights.
Power BI is one of the world’s most popular dashboarding tool’s used to visualize data and for creating interactive reports and dashboards. It’s sometimes included in your Microsoft 365 subscription, otherwise can be purchased as an add-on license 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 visualizations. 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 analyze customer buying patterns.
Contrasting this with Microsoft Fabric
While a standalone SQL database paired with Power BI can serve as a simple 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 centralized 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 focus on reporting and visualization. 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, licenses, 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 $100s of dollars per month) ensures data security, compliance, and standardized data management practices across the entire platform.
Prebuilt Integrations
One of the strengths of Microsoft Fabric lies in its prebuilt integrations with various other Microsoft and third-party services.
Having these prebuilt makes it affordable and reliable to import data into your data platform. That said, Microsoft appear to have started at the most popular integrations for enterprises and larger businesses. So although the list of integrations is long, it’s not all-encompassing.
For small and mid sized businesses, they generally have a mix of apps comprising CRMs, marketing systems, ERPs, eCommerce platforms and specialty vertical apps such as legal platforms for lawyers, shipping/booking platforms for logistics providers.
While Microsoft have offered support in the past for apps such as Shopify and Hubspot via dataflows, at the time of writing (October 2024) these aren’t around yet. There are some simple workarounds - and custom connectors can be created too - and I’d imagine at some point these integrations are added to Fabric, but right now it’s something to be aware of.
Pricing Comparison
Microsoft Fabric
For small and midsized businesses, Fabric is generally charged in two components:
a compute allowance
PowerBI report sharing
Compute
In the case of the compute allowance, in Australian dollars the smallest capacity (F2) costs around AUD 0.65c 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’s not yet an easy way to auto-start/shut down Fabric at predefined times, I’d generally recommend organisations purchase a 12 month reservation upfront, as it offers a saving around 40% over the year.
One caveat to the F2 capacity is that it is primarily designed for the “back end” data services, such as running a data warehouse and integrations. The smallest capacity required to publish a PowerBI report is an F16, which is about AUD$5.00 per hour, or AUD$2300 per month on a 12 month reservation. Thus I’d generally suggest you budget for at least an F16 for starters.
PowerBI
The cost of sharing reports is the other main factor you need to consider with Fabric. While there is a free PowerBI desktop tool that anyone in your organisation can use for adhoc data reporting, the moment they wish to share this report requires (a) a place to store the report and (b) a user with a PowerBI license to access this shared report.
The Fabric F16 capacity offers a place to store PowerBI reports, so in most scenarios smaller businesses just need to count up the amount of people who need to access shared reports and purchase a PowerBI Pro license for them. PowerBI Pro licenses start at AUD$15 per month per user (Power BI: Pricing Plans), however also come included with Microsoft 365 E5 plans.
One last point - the Fabric F64 capacity includes the reader license for PowerBI 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 far quicker for them to produce insights, which could result in a labour saving or reduced professional services bill.
Price comparison - simple reporting solution
By comparison, an simple reporting environment for an SMB might comprise of an SQL datamart (a “serverless” configuration on Azure could be under $100 per month) plus the required PowerBI licenses, and Azure Data Factory to help with the integrations (charged on usage, varies by workload). So these can be very 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 a lot more complicated quickly and the costs to implement and support such an environment will add up quickly. 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’s possible many datamarts start to bubble up, causing costs to increase quite quickly.
So from a pricing perspective, if your reporting requirements are super simple, if you are happy to control all end user permissions and access from PowerbI, and your needss are expected to remain this way for the foreseeable future, then Fabric might be overkill. But if you’re looking for flexibiltiy and scalability, it’s often worth investigating Fabric closer.
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 that they might want.
Its unified platform, comprehensive features, and intuitive tools can empower businesses to gain valuable insights, improve decision-making, and drive growth.
For small and medium businesses, I’d generally say moving towards Fabric is a good idea, as 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’s essential to consider your specific business needs, data volume, technical expertise, and budget before making a decision. The free trial offered by Microsoft provides an excellent opportunity to explore the platform’s capabilities and determine if it’s the right fit for your organization.