A question on security of Azure vs Fabric

Nov '24 • General

I know I know the title sounds like I have no idea what im talking about but bear with me. I work in government, and we use Power Bi (P2 premium) subscription, Ive been advocating for fabirc and luckly It is free for the moment under our P2. I know this will cease and we will likley migrate to fabric anyway, but there has been quite a lot of development put into ADLS2 and Azure Data factory, which is fine, but it comes with an Admin account and a VM to access it. This creates workarounds, bottlenecks and specific skills etc. I dont need to explain the benefits of Fabric to you guys.

SO here is the situation.

Somehow the nature of Azure and our firewall means we (using above methods) open the firewall to access azure and develop pipelines. This, while 'the plan' for us seems redundant and I have been shouting about 'just doing it in fabric'. Sadly, IT are slow to change and hesitant to open up access and use Onelake. We even had fabric workloads for a while before it got shut off.

The question is what is the fundamental difference between storing data, running pipleines and such in Azure vs in Fabric, I know fabric is the underlying platform for PBI and that Fabric runs on Azure in the back end, but what does that actually mean in terms of security, access, and how does it differ in PAAS (azure) and SAAS (fabric)?

I need to be able to articulate that Fabric is really no different from Power bi in terms of security, (which seems the case) and how that differs to Azure.

I know we can shortcut to ADLS etc, but its more about the access..

Appreciate you reading and any advice!

Cheers

Ross

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