5 must know Microsoft Fabric Features from FabCon
Over 25,000 organisations, including 67% of the Fortune 500, are leveraging Microsoft Fabric for unified data solutions. And with FabCon fast approaching, Microsoft Fabric is unveiling a series of powerful updates designed to enhance security, AI-driven insights, and data management. These features will help organisations streamline operations, strengthen governance, and unlock greater value from their data.
Having worked with organisations of all sizes, we at Simpson Associates constantly observe common challenges. These include – data silos slowing down collaboration, data security policies requiring constant maintenance, and reporting processes that take longer than they should. These new Microsoft Fabric updates aim to address these pain points.
I am personally excited that the latest Fabric updates will make data more accessible, simplify the discovery of business insights, and streamline security so it’s simpler to manage.
Here are the five most impactful Fabric features launching at FabCon, which I believe will have the most significant impact:
1. OneLake Security – Unified and Consistent Data Protection
What’s new in OneLake Security?
Managing cloud and data security across multiple platforms is often complex and inconsistent. Many organisations find themselves either restricting data access controls too much, creating data access bottlenecks, or leaving data security gaps that could lead to unauthorised access.
OneLake Security simplifies data protection by allowing organisations to define access policies once and enforce them automatically across all analytics engines in Fabric. With row and column-level security, organisations can restrict sensitive data – such as personal identifiers – without limiting broader access to important insights.
Why does it matter?
Data security should not be a barrier to productivity, but in many organisations, it is. Maintaining consistent access controls across different tools often requires significant manual effort, leading to inefficiencies and potential security compliance risks.
How does it help organisations?
By centralising and automating security enforcement, OneLake Security ensures only authorised users can access sensitive data while removing the need for repetitive manual configurations. This helps organisations maintain compliance, reduce the risk of data breaches, and improve overall governance – without slowing down collaboration.
2. Fabric Copilot for All SKUs – AI-Powered Analytics for Everyone
What’s new in Fabric Copilot?
Previously, Fabric’s AI-powered Copilot was limited to higher-tier SKUs, meaning many organisations were unable to leverage its automation and insight-generation capabilities.
This update expands Copilot to all Microsoft Fabric SKUs, making AI-powered analytics more accessible. Organisations can also allocate Copilot usage to specific teams or workloads, ensuring AI-driven processes do not interfere with other high-priority tasks.
Why does it matter?
AI is rapidly transforming data analysis, but if only a select few have access to it, the benefits remain limited. Many organisations still rely on manual reporting and analysis, which can be both time-consuming and prone to human error.
How does it help organisations?
With AI assistance available to more business users, teams can generate data reports faster, uncover business insights more efficiently, and reduce the burden on data specialists. This democratisation of AI ensures data-driven decision-making becomes part of everyday business intelligence processes, rather than a specialised function within select teams.
3. AI-Powered OneLake Enhancements – Smarter Data Discovery & Integration
What’s new in AI-Powered OneLake?
Locating and understanding data is a challenge for many organisations. We’ve seen teams spend far too much time searching for the right dataset or manually reviewing documentation to understand its data relevance.
Fabric’s latest OneLake updates introduce AI-powered metadata tagging and search capabilities. The Copilot in OneLake Catalog now automatically generates dataset descriptions, making data discovery more intuitive. Additionally, expanded support for Amazon S3, Google Cloud, and other cloud storage providers ensures that organisations can connect and unify data sources more efficiently.
Why does it matter?
Data accessibility is just as important as data security. When teams struggle to locate the right data, they either spend unnecessary time recreating reports or risk using outdated information. Traditional manual cataloging is inefficient, often failing to keep up with changing data landscapes.
How does it help organisations?
By enabling AI-powered search and metadata tagging, Fabric helps teams find and understand data faster, improving productivity and reducing redundancy. Enhanced cloud connectivity also ensures that data from multiple sources can be accessed and integrated more easily, supporting better insights and decision-making.
4. Power BI’s Immersive Copilot Experience – Simplified, AI-Driven Analytics
What’s new in Power BIs Immersive Copilot Experience?
For many organisations, business intelligence (BI) tools are powerful but complex, often requiring technical expertise or specialist data teams to generate reports. This can create decision-making delays as business users wait for actionable insights and data visualisations to be compiled.
The new Copilot experience in Power BI introduces an interactive, chat-first interface, allowing users to ask natural language questions and instantly generate AI-powered reports and visuals.
Why does it matter?
Data analysis should be accessible to all teams, not just data specialists. Many employees hesitate to engage with BI tools due to complex interfaces or the need for SQL knowledge, leading to a reliance on pre-built dashboards that may not fully meet their needs.
How does it help organisations?
By making data easier to explore through AI-driven natural language interactions, Power BI’s Copilot ensures that users at all levels can access the insights they need quickly. This speeds up reporting, enhances data-driven decision-making, and reduces the workload on BI teams, allowing them to focus on more strategic analysis.
5. Microsoft Purview Integration – Proactive Data Governance & Compliance
What’s new in Microsoft Purview Integration?
Data security and compliance remain top priorities, but many organisations still rely on manual monitoring and periodic audits to detect policy violations. By the time an issue is identified, it is often too late.
Microsoft Purview is now fully integrated into Fabric, bringing real-time governance and compliance monitoring. AI-powered tools can detect sensitive data in reports, automate Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, and flag security risks before they escalate.
Why does it matter?
With increasingly strict data regulations and the rapid adoption of AI-driven analytics, ensuring compliance in real time is more critical than ever. Traditional manual oversight methods are both time-consuming and prone to human error.
How does it help organisations?
By embedding automated compliance monitoring and AI-driven risk detection, as well as data loss prevention (DLP), Microsoft Fabric helps organisations enforce security policies consistently, reduce the risk of compliance violations (e.g., GDPR, CPPA), and strengthen overall data governance and information security – all without adding unnecessary manual processes or increasing operational overhead.
Final Thoughts
The latest Microsoft Fabric updates bring enhanced security, AI-powered insights, and smarter data management, helping organisations simplify operations, reduce risks, and make better use of their data. From removing security complexities with OneLake Security to making AI analytics more accessible across all SKUs, these updates reflect a clear focus: helping organisations become more efficient, compliant, and data driven. We at Simpson Associates are excited to see the impact of these advancements.
Blog Author
Ash Armstrong
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
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