Governance & Security in Microsoft Fabric

As organizations adopt Microsoft Fabric to unify their data and analytics, ensuring governance and security becomes critical. Data is a strategic asset, and protecting it requires a mix of access controls, sensitivity labeling, and monitoring tools. Fabric brings these capabilities together so enterprises can innovate without sacrificing compliance.

Role-Based Access Control in Fabric

Fabric uses role-based access control (RBAC) to manage who can access workspaces, datasets, and other resources:

• Workspace roles (Admin, Member, Contributor, Viewer) define what users can do within a workspace.
• Item-level permissions allow fine-grained control over Lakehouses, Warehouses, Notebooks, Reports, and more.
• Integration with Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) ensures that access is governed by organizational identity policies.

RBAC makes it possible to strike the balance between collaboration and security giving the right people access to the right data, while preventing unauthorized use.

Data Sensitivity Labels and Information Protection

Data protection doesn’t stop at access, it extends to classifying and labeling data to prevent misuse. In Fabric, you can apply Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels directly to datasets and reports.

• Sensitivity labels (e.g., Confidential, Highly Confidential, Public) travel with the data across Fabric and Power BI.
• Labels enforce protection settings such as encryption, watermarks, or restrictions on sharing/exporting.
• This ensures consistent information protection policies across the Microsoft ecosystem from Fabric to Office apps.

By classifying data at the source, organizations can reduce the risk of accidental leaks or misuse of sensitive information.

Audit Logs and Compliance Tools

For regulated industries, visibility and traceability are just as important as protection. Fabric supports audit logs and compliance monitoring to help organizations stay accountable:

• Unified audit logs (integrated with Microsoft Purview and Microsoft 365 compliance center) record user and admin activities across Fabric.
• Security teams can query logs to investigate suspicious activity, monitor data access, or generate compliance reports.
• Combined with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, organizations gain advanced monitoring and alerting capabilities.

These tools provide the evidence needed for compliance certifications and give confidence that governance policies are enforced.

Key Takeaway

Governance and security in Microsoft Fabric are built on three pillars:

1. RBAC for controlled access,
2. Sensitivity labels for data protection, and
3. Audit logs for accountability and compliance.

Together, they provide a trustworthy foundation for building and sharing analytics at scale, so organizations can focus on insights while meeting enterprise security and compliance requirements.