Beyond Reporting: Expanding Power BI into a Unified Microsoft Fabric Data Platform

Many organizations have adopted Power BI as their go-to reporting tool — often with Power BI Premium in place. But what if that investment could unlock more than just dashboards? With Microsoft Fabric, Power BI becomes the gateway to a fully integrated data platform that consolidates analytics, engineering, and governance into a single experience.

Power BI: A Familiar Starting Point

Power BI is widely used for:

• Interactive dashboards and reports

• Data modeling and DAX-based analytics

• Scheduled refreshes and dataflows

However, many teams still rely on external tools for data ingestion, transformation, and storage — leading to fragmented architectures and duplicated effort.

The Opportunity: Expand into Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric builds on Power BI’s foundation and introduces a unified SaaS platform that includes:

• Data Factory for data movement and transformation

• Data Engineering and Data Warehousing for scalable analytics

• Real-time Intelligence for analyzing streaming data in near-real time

• Data Activator for real-time triggers and automation

• Data Science for AI powered workflows, insights and data enrichment

• Databases for unified database experience at cloud scale

• OneLake for centralized, open-format data storage

• Power BI for visualization and business intelligence

• Copilot for accelerated productivity and creativity

All of this is accessible through the same Power BI interface — no new portals, no complex integrations.

Why Power BI Premium Users Are Ready

If your organization already uses Power BI Premium, you’re closer to Fabric than you think:

• Capacity-based licensing now includes Fabric workloads

• Power BI datasets can be extended into Lakehouses, Warehouses and Notebooks

• Dataflows Gen2 is fully integrated with with OneLake and all Fabric workloads

This means you can consolidate your data platform without starting from scratch.

A Practical Expansion Path

Here’s how organizations can evolve from Power BI-only to full Fabric adoption:

1. Assess Existing Power BI Assets

   • Identify datasets, dataflows, and refresh schedules

   • Map data sources and transformation logic

2. Introduce Fabric Workloads

   • Use Data Factory pipelines to replace manual refreshes

   • Store curated data in Lakehouses for reuse across teams

   • Use Warehouses for data modelling with star and snowflake schemas

   • Leverage Notebooks for advanced data prep and enrichment

3. Unify Governance and Monitoring

   • Utilize built-in lineage and access control or integrate with Microsoft Purview

   • Monitor workloads and usage from a single pane of glass

4. Enable Domain Teams

   • Empower teams to build data products with shared infrastructure

   • Promote reuse and collaboration across departments

Benefits of Expanding into Fabric

• Simplified architecture with fewer moving parts

• Improved performance and scalability

• Centralized governance and security

• Faster time to insight with integrated tooling

How We Can Help

Alta Computing works with organizations to:

• Assess Power BI environments for Fabric readiness

• Design and implement Fabric workloads

• Train BI teams to leverage the full platform

Whether you're just exploring or ready to expand, we help you make the most of your Microsoft investment.

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Ready to take Power BI to the next level? Contact us to explore your Fabric adoption path.