EPC Group provides governance-first Microsoft Fabric consulting: OneLake architecture, Direct Lake design, Lakehouse implementation, Synapse-to-Fabric migration, and compliance-native analytics for healthcare, finance, and government. We deliver fixed-fee accelerators with quantified TCO outcomes. 29 years of Microsoft data platform experience.
Key Facts
- Microsoft Fabric unifies Power BI, data engineering, data warehousing, real-time analytics, and data science into one SaaS platform.
- OneLake is Fabric's built-in data lake — one storage layer serving all seven Fabric workloads without data copies.
- Direct Lake mode lets Power BI read directly from OneLake Parquet files — no data import, no latency, no duplication.
- Enterprises on Microsoft 365 plus Power BI typically see 30–50% lower TCO moving to Fabric vs. maintaining a separate analytics warehouse.
- EPC Group: 29 years of Microsoft consulting, 1,500+ Power BI deployments, 500+ Microsoft Fabric projects, all six Solutions Partner designations.
Microsoft Fabric + Power BI Consulting
Unified Analytics Platform | OneLake Data Architecture | Enterprise AI & Real-Time Analytics
Already using Power BI?
Fabric extends your Power BI investment with unified data management and AI capabilities. Your existing reports continue to work seamlessly.
What is Microsoft Fabric + Power BI?
Microsoft Fabric Capabilities
Microsoft Fabric is the unified analytics platform that brings together Power BI, Data Factory, Synapse, and more into a single SaaS solution. It's not a replacement for Power BI—it's the enterprise foundation that makes Power BI even more powerful.
Power BI: Visualization Layer
Delivers actionable insights to business users through interactive dashboards and reports.
- Business intelligence reporting
- Self-service analytics
- Mobile dashboards
Fabric: Unified Platform
Manages data unification, engineering, governance, and AI workloads across your entire data estate.
- OneLake unified data storage
- Data engineering pipelines
- AI & machine learning
Together: Enterprise Analytics
Creates harmonized ecosystem that eliminates data silos and positions you for AI-driven growth.
- No data duplication
- Unified security & governance
- AI-ready architecture
Power BI vs Microsoft Fabric: Understanding the Relationship
| Capability | Power BI | Microsoft Fabric |
|---|---|---|
| Business Intelligence | Includes Power BI | |
| Data Engineering | Limited (Dataflows) | Full Data Factory |
| Unified Data Storage | Separate datasets | OneLake |
| Real-Time Analytics | Limited | Full Synapse Real-Time |
| Data Science & AI | Basic AI visuals | Full ML workspace |
| Data Governance | RLS, sensitivity labels | Unified governance across all data |
| Best For | Departmental BI and reporting | Enterprise data platform for AI-driven transformation |
Key Insight: Microsoft Fabric includes Power BI as its visualization layer. You don't choose between them—Fabric extends Power BI with enterprise data platform capabilities.
Our Microsoft Fabric Services
EPC Group delivers end-to-end Fabric implementation with 29 years of Microsoft Gold Partner expertise and proven Fortune 500 deployment experience.
Fabric Enablement & Assessment
2-4 week activation: Enable Microsoft Fabric on your Power BI tenant, assess current data architecture, and design unified platform roadmap.
- Current state data architecture assessment
- Fabric capacity planning and sizing
- OneLake architecture design
- Cost-benefit analysis and ROI projection
Power BI Premium → Fabric Migration
Seamless migration from Power BI Premium P SKUs to Microsoft Fabric with zero downtime for 10K+ user environments.
- Premium capacity to Fabric capacity conversion
- Workspace migration strategy
- Existing Power BI content validation
- User training and change management
Data Estate Unification
Consolidate fragmented data sources into OneLake, eliminating silos and enabling unified analytics across your organization.
- Multi-source data integration (SQL, Oracle, SAP, APIs)
- Delta Lake architecture implementation
- Data quality and master data management
- Medallion architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold layers)
Capacity Optimization & Cost Management
Optimize Fabric capacity usage and implement monitoring to reduce costs by 20-30% while improving performance.
- Capacity utilization monitoring and alerting
- Workload optimization and performance tuning
- Autoscale configuration for dynamic workloads
- Cost allocation and chargeback reporting
AI-Ready Data Architecture
Design and implement Fabric architecture optimized for generative AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics with enterprise governance.
- Azure OpenAI integration with Fabric for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
- ML model deployment and monitoring pipelines
- Real-time inference and model serving
- AI governance frameworks (bias detection, explainability)
- HIPAA/SOC 2-compliant AI data pipelines
- Responsible AI implementation and audit trails
Why Choose EPC Group for Microsoft Fabric?
Partner with Microsoft Gold Partner experts who combine deep technical expertise with compliance-first approach for Fortune 500 enterprises.
29 Years Expertise
Microsoft Gold Partner since 1997. Deep Power BI and Azure analytics expertise with bestselling author Errin O'Connor on team.
Compliance-First
Specialized in HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, and FedRAMP-aligned Fabric implementations for healthcare and financial services.
Fortune 500 Portfolio
Proven experience with 10K+ user enterprise deployments. Boutique service quality at enterprise scale.
End-to-End Support
From assessment through migration, optimization, and ongoing managed services—we're with you every step.
What Sets EPC Group Apart from Avanade, Accenture, and Slalom?
While large consultancies compete on scale (Avanade's 10,000 trained employees, Accenture's 4,000 Fabric-certified professionals), EPC Group delivers boutique expertise with Fortune 500 experience. You get direct access to Microsoft Press bestselling authors and 29 years of proven implementation success—not junior consultants learning on your project.
Personalized Service
Senior consultants on every engagement
Compliance Expertise
HIPAA, SOC 2, FedRAMP specialists
Faster Time-to-Value
Streamlined decision-making, no bureaucracy
Microsoft Fabric Use Cases by Industry
Real-world Fabric implementations solving complex enterprise data challenges with measurable ROI.
Healthcare: Unified Patient Data
Large hospital network consolidated EHR data from 5 disparate systems into Fabric OneLake, enabling HIPAA-compliant real-time patient analytics with Power BI.
- Challenge: Fragmented patient data across systems
- Solution: Fabric OneLake + Power BI with HIPAA compliance
- Result: 40% faster clinical decision-making
Finance: Real-Time Risk Analytics
Fortune 100 bank deployed Fabric for real-time fraud detection and regulatory reporting with SOC 2 compliance and audit trails.
- Challenge: Siloed risk data, slow regulatory reporting
- Solution: Fabric real-time analytics + ML models
- Result: 60% reduction in fraud losses
Manufacturing: Predictive Maintenance
Global manufacturer implemented Fabric with IoT data streams and AI models for predictive maintenance, reducing downtime by 35%.
- Challenge: Reactive maintenance causing costly downtime
- Solution: Fabric + IoT + ML for predictive models
- Result: $2.5M annual savings
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about Microsoft Fabric and Power BI integration answered by our experts.
What's the difference between Power BI and Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric is a unified analytics platform that includes Power BI as its visualization layer. While Power BI focuses on business intelligence and reporting, Fabric extends this with data engineering, data warehousing, data science, and real-time analytics capabilities. Think of it as: Power BI delivers insights to business users, while Fabric manages the entire data estate including unification, engineering, governance, and AI workloads.
Should we migrate from Power BI Premium to Microsoft Fabric?
Yes, Microsoft is retiring Power BI Premium P SKUs, requiring enterprises to migrate to Microsoft Fabric. Beyond the necessity, Fabric offers significant advantages: unified data platform eliminating tool fragmentation, OneLake for centralized data storage, built-in AI capabilities, and better cost optimization through capacity management. EPC Group provides comprehensive migration services with zero downtime for 10K+ user environments.
How much does Microsoft Fabric cost compared to Power BI Premium?
Microsoft Fabric uses capacity-based pricing similar to Power BI Premium, but offers more flexibility with Fabric Capacity Units (CUs). Pricing depends on workload requirements, data volume, and concurrent users. EPC Group provides capacity planning and cost optimization services to ensure you get the best value. Most enterprises see 20-30% cost reduction through proper capacity management and workload optimization.
Is Microsoft Fabric secure for healthcare and financial services data?
Yes, Microsoft Fabric is enterprise-grade secure with compliance certifications including HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and FedRAMP. It inherits all security features from Microsoft 365 including data encryption at rest and in transit, row-level security, data loss prevention, and comprehensive audit logging. EPC Group specializes in compliance-focused Fabric implementations for healthcare and financial services organizations.
Can we use Microsoft Fabric with our existing Power BI reports?
Absolutely. Microsoft Fabric is fully backward compatible with existing Power BI content. Your dashboards, reports, datasets, and dataflows continue to work seamlessly. Fabric enhances your Power BI environment with unified data management, improved performance through OneLake, and advanced analytics capabilities. Migration requires no changes to existing Power BI reports.
What is OneLake in Microsoft Fabric?
OneLake is the unified data lake at the heart of Microsoft Fabric. It provides a single, centralized storage layer for all your data across the organization, eliminating data silos and duplication. OneLake uses open Delta Parquet format, integrates natively with Power BI and all Fabric workloads, and provides automatic data governance and security. Think of it as "OneDrive for data" - one copy of data accessible by all analytics tools.
Have more questions about Microsoft Fabric?
Schedule Free ConsultationReady to Modernize Your Data Platform?
Schedule a free Microsoft Fabric assessment with our experts. We'll analyze your current architecture and design a roadmap for unified analytics.
Microsoft Fabric Consulting Services
EPC Group provides governance-first Microsoft Fabric consulting: OneLake architecture, Direct Lake design, Lakehouse implementation, Synapse-to-Fabric migration, and compliance-native analytics for healthcare, finance, and government. We deliver fixed-fee accelerators with quantified TCO outcomes. 29 years of Microsoft data platform experience.
Key facts
- Microsoft Fabric unifies Power BI, data engineering, data warehousing, real-time analytics, and data science into one SaaS platform.
- OneLake is Fabric's built-in data lake — one storage layer serving all seven Fabric workloads without data copies.
- Direct Lake mode lets Power BI read directly from OneLake Parquet files — no data import, no latency, no duplication.
- Enterprises on Microsoft 365 plus Power BI typically see 30–50% lower TCO moving to Fabric vs. maintaining a separate analytics warehouse.
- EPC Group: 29 years of Microsoft consulting, 1,500+ Power BI deployments, 500+ Microsoft Fabric projects, all six Solutions Partner designations.
What Microsoft Fabric provides
Fabric replaces four separate Azure analytics services with one governed platform.
- Unified data platform — eliminates tool fragmentation across Azure Data Lake, Synapse, Spark, and Power BI.
- OneLake centralized storage — one data lake that all Fabric workloads share without data duplication.
- Built-in AI capabilities — Fabric Copilot for data engineering, Power BI Copilot, and Data Science workload for ML model training.
- Capacity cost optimization — F-SKU licensing replaces multiple per-user and per-capacity billing relationships with a single capacity charge.
- Direct Lake mode — Power BI reads from OneLake directly, eliminating import latency and storage duplication for large semantic models.
Our Microsoft Fabric services
Fabric Enablement and Assessment
We evaluate your current data estate and produce a Fabric adoption roadmap. Output: a quantified TCO comparison showing the cost of staying vs. migrating to Fabric.
- Current-state data architecture audit (Azure services, Power BI, Synapse).
- Fabric readiness scoring across five dimensions: architecture, governance, skills, licensing, and compliance.
- Migration prioritization: which workloads to move to Fabric first based on ROI and risk.
Power BI Premium to Fabric Migration
Power BI Premium P-SKU customers should evaluate migration to Fabric F-SKUs. Fabric F64 ($5,257/month) provides equivalent Power BI Premium capacity plus access to all six additional Fabric workloads at comparable cost.
- P-SKU to F-SKU capacity sizing and cost analysis.
- Semantic model migration to Direct Lake mode.
- Workspace reorganization for Fabric governance model.
- Capacity optimization: reserved F64+ pricing saves 40% vs. pay-as-you-go.
Data Estate Unification
We consolidate fragmented Azure analytics stacks — Azure Data Lake, Synapse, Databricks, and Power BI — into a governed Fabric environment.
- OneLake shortcut design: reference existing ADLS data without copying.
- Medallion architecture: Bronze/Silver/Gold Delta Lake layers with data quality gates.
- Synapse-to-Fabric Lakehouse migration with pipeline and notebook conversion.
AI-Ready Data Architecture
We build data foundations that ground AI models accurately. Poorly governed data produces inaccurate AI — and Copilot governance starts at the data layer.
- Purview sensitivity labels on OneLake tables for data classification.
- Semantic model design for Power BI Copilot and Azure OpenAI grounding.
- Data quality monitoring with Delta Lake expectations and Fabric Data Activator alerts.
OneLake architecture explained
OneLake uses a shortcut model that eliminates data duplication across analytics workloads.
- A single physical Parquet file in OneLake serves Fabric Lakehouse queries (Spark), Fabric Warehouse queries (T-SQL), Real-Time Intelligence queries (KQL), and Power BI reports (Direct Lake) — simultaneously.
- Shortcuts reference external data in Azure Data Lake Storage, AWS S3, or Google Cloud Storage without physically copying data into OneLake.
- This eliminates the copy-and-transform overhead that most Synapse and Databricks architectures require.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Microsoft Fabric and Power BI?
Power BI is the visualization and reporting workload inside Microsoft Fabric. Fabric extends Power BI by adding upstream data engineering (Lakehouse, Warehouse), real-time analytics (KQL), and data science (ML) — all on OneLake. Power BI Premium customers should evaluate migrating to Fabric F64 to access all seven Fabric workloads at comparable cost.
What is Direct Lake mode in Microsoft Fabric?
Direct Lake is a Power BI query mode exclusive to Fabric. It reads directly from OneLake Parquet files — bypassing the traditional data import step. No data copy, no refresh lag, no storage duplication. For large semantic models (100M+ rows), Direct Lake is significantly faster than Import mode and eliminates the capacity overhead of double-storing data.
How does Fabric reduce total cost of ownership?
Three ways: (1) One capacity license replaces separate Azure Data Lake, Synapse, and Power BI Premium billing. (2) OneLake eliminates data duplication, reducing storage costs. (3) Reserved F64+ capacity is 40% less expensive than pay-as-you-go. For enterprises already on Microsoft 365 and Power BI, the additional cost of full Fabric capability is typically 30–50% less than maintaining a separate analytics warehouse.
How long does a Fabric Enablement Assessment take?
EPC Group's Fabric Enablement Assessment runs 2–4 weeks. Output: current-state data architecture audit, Fabric readiness score, migration prioritization roadmap, and quantified TCO comparison. We size the F-SKU tier, identify which workloads to migrate first, and produce a phased migration plan with timeline and fixed-fee estimates per phase.
Does Microsoft Fabric work for HIPAA-regulated healthcare data?
Yes. Microsoft Fabric runs on Azure and is covered by the Power Platform/Azure Business Associate Agreement (BAA). EPC Group configures HIPAA-compliant Fabric environments: PHI sensitivity labels on Lakehouse tables, row-level security, column-level encryption for PHI attributes, Purview audit logging, and DLP policies preventing unauthorized access to regulated content.
Start with a Fabric assessment
EPC Group's Fabric Enablement Assessment quantifies the TCO impact of moving to Fabric for your specific data estate. Call (888) 381-9725 or schedule a discovery call.