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Security in Microsoft Fabric

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Microsoft Fabric is a software as a service (SaaS) platform that lets users get, create, share, and visualize data.

As a SaaS service, Fabric offers a complete security package for the entire platform. Fabric removes the cost and responsibility of maintaining your security solution, and transfers it to the cloud. With Fabric, you can use the expertise and resources of Microsoft to keep your data secure, patch vulnerabilities, monitor threats, and comply with regulations. Fabric also allows you to manage, control and audit your security settings, in line with your changing needs and demands.

As you bring your data to the cloud and use it with various analytic experiences such as Power BI, Data Factory, and the next generation of Synapse, Microsoft ensures that built-in security and reliability features secure your data at rest and in transit. Microsoft also makes sure that your data is recoverable in cases of infrastructure failures or disasters.

Fabric security is:

  • Always on - Every interaction with Fabric is encrypted by default and authenticated using Microsoft Entra ID. All communication between Fabric experiences travels through the Microsoft backbone internet. Data at rest is automatically stored encrypted. To regulate access to Fabric, you can add extra security features such as Private Links or Entra Conditional Access . Fabric can also connect to data protected by a firewall or a private network using trusted access.

  • Compliant – Fabric has data sovereignty out of the box with multi geo capacities. Fabric also supports a wide range of compliance standards.

  • Governable - Fabric comes with a set of governance tools such data lineage, information protection labels, data loss prevention and purview integration.

  • Configurable - You can configure Fabric security in accordance with your organizational policies.

  • Evolving - Microsoft is constantly improving Fabric security, by adding new features and controls.

Authenticate

Microsoft Fabric is a SaaS platform, like many other Microsoft services such as Azure, Microsoft Office, OneDrive, and Dynamics. All these Microsoft SaaS services including Fabric, use Microsoft Entra ID as their cloud-based identity provider. Microsoft Entra ID helps users connect to these services quickly and easily from any device and any network. Every request to connect to Fabric is authenticated with Microsoft Entra ID, allowing users to safely connect to Fabric from their corporate office, when working at home, or from a remote location.

Understand network security

Fabric is SaaS service that runs in the Microsoft cloud. Some scenarios involve connecting to data that's outside of the Fabric platform. For example, viewing a report from your own network or connecting to data that's in another service. Interactions within Fabric use the internal Microsoft network and traffic outside of the service is protected by default. For more information and a detailed description, see Data in transit.

Inbound network security

Your organization might want to restrict and secure the network traffic coming into Fabric based on your company's requirements. With Microsoft Entra ID Conditional Access and Private Links, you can select the right inbound solution for your organization.

Microsoft Entra ID Conditional Access

Microsoft Entra ID provides Fabric with Conditional Access which allows you to secure access to Fabric on every connection. Here are a few examples of access restrictions you can enforce using Conditional Access.

  • Define a list of IPs for inbound connectivity to Fabric.

  • Use Multifactor Authentication (MFA).

  • Restrict traffic based on parameters such as country of origin or device type.

To configure conditional access, see Conditional access in Fabric.

To understand more about authentication in Fabric, see Microsoft Fabric security fundamentals.

Private links enable secure connectivity to Fabric by restricting access to your Fabric tenant from an Azure virtual network (VNet), and blocking all public access. This ensures that only network traffic from that VNet is allowed to access Fabric features such as Notebooks, Lakehouses, and data warehouses, in your tenant.

To configure Private Links in Fabric, see Set up and use private links.

Outbound network security

Fabric has a set of tools that allow you to connect to external data sources and bring that data into Fabric in a secure way. This section lists different ways to import and connect to data from a secure network into fabric.

Trusted workspace access

With Fabric you can access firewall enabled Azure Data Lake Gen 2 accounts securely. Fabric workspaces that have a workspace identity can securely access Azure Data Lake Gen 2 accounts with public network access enabled, from selected virtual networks and IP addresses. You can limit ADLS gen 2 access to specific Fabric workspaces. For more information, see Trusted workspace access.

Note

Fabric workspace identities can only be created in workspaces associated with a Fabric F SKU capacity. For information about buying a Fabric subscription, see Buy a Microsoft Fabric subscription.

Managed Private Endpoints

Managed private endpoints allow secure connections to data sources such Azure SQL databases without exposing them to the public network or requiring complex network configurations.

Managed virtual networks

Managed virtual networks are virtual networks that are created and managed by Microsoft Fabric for each Fabric workspace. Managed virtual networks provide network isolation for Fabric Spark workloads, meaning that the compute clusters are deployed in a dedicated network and are no longer part of the shared virtual network.

Managed virtual networks also enable network security features such as managed private endpoints, and private link support for Data Engineering and Data Science items in Microsoft Fabric that use Apache Spark.

Data gateway

To connect to on-premises data sources or a data source that might be protected by a firewall or a virtual network, you can use one of these options:

  • On-premises data gateway - The gateway acts as a bridge between your on-premises data sources and Fabric. The gateway is installed on a server within your network, and it allows Fabric to connect to your data sources through a secure channel without the need to open ports or make changes to your network.

  • Virtual network (VNet) data gateway - The VNet gateway allows you to connect from Microsoft Cloud services to your Azure data services within a VNet, without the need of an on-premises data gateway.

Connect to OneLake from an existing service

You can connect to Fabric using your existing Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) service. For Synapse and Azure Data Factory (ADF) you can use Azure Integration Runtime (IR) or Azure Data Factory managed virtual network. You can also connect to these services and other services such as Mapping data flows, Synapse Spark clusters, Databricks Spark clusters and Azure HDInsight using OneLake APIs.

Azure service tags

Use service Tags to ingest data without the use of data gateways, from data sources deployed in an Azure virtual network, such as Azure SQL Virtual Machines (VMs), Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI) and REST APIs. You can also use service tags to get traffic from a virtual network or an Azure firewall. For example, service tags can allow outbound traffic to Fabric so that a user on a VM can connect to Fabric SQL connection strings from SSMS, while blocked from accessing other public internet resources.

IP allowlists

If you have data that doesn't reside in Azure, you can enable an IP allowlist on your organization's network to allow traffic to and from Fabric. An IP allowlist is useful if you need to get data from data sources that don't support service tags, such as on-premises data sources. With these shortcuts, you can get data without copying it into OneLake using a Lakehouse SQL analytics endpoint or Direct Lake.

You can get the list of Fabric IPs from Service tags on-premises. The list is available as a JSON file, or programmatically with REST APIs, PowerShell, and Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI).

Secure Data

In Fabric, all data that is stored in OneLake is encrypted at rest. All data at rest is stored in your home region, or in one of your capacities at a remote region of your choice so that you can meet data at rest sovereignty regulations. For more information, see Microsoft Fabric security fundamentals.

Understand tenants in multiple geographies

Many organizations have a global presence and require services in multiple Azure geographies. For example, a company can have its headquarters in the United States, while doing business in other geographical areas, such as Australia. To comply with local regulations, businesses with a global presence need to ensure that data remains stored at rest in several regions. In Fabric, this is called multi-geo.

The query execution layer, query caches, and item data assigned to a multi-geo workspace remain in the Azure geography of their creation. However, some metadata, and processing, is stored at rest in the tenant's home geography.

Fabric is part of a larger Microsoft ecosystem. If your organization is already using other cloud subscription services, such as Azure, Microsoft 365, or Dynamics 365, then Fabric operates within the same Microsoft Entra tenant. Your organizational domain (for example, contoso.com) is associated with Microsoft Entra ID. Like all Microsoft cloud services.

Fabric ensures that your data is secure across regions when you're working with several tenants that have multiple capacities across a number of geographies.

Access data

Fabric controls data access using workspaces. In workspaces, data appears in the form of Fabric items, and users can't view or use items (data) unless you give them access to the workspace. You can find more information about workspace and item permissions, in Permission model.

Workspace roles

Workspace access is listed in the table below. It includes workspace roles and Fabric and OneLake security. Users with a viewer role can run SQL, Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) or Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) queries, but they can't access Fabric items or run a notebook.

Role Workspace access OneLake access
Admin, member, and contributor Can use all the items in the workspace ✅
Viewer Can see all the items in the workspace ❌

Share items

You can share Fabric items with users in your organization that don't have any workspace role. Sharing items gives restricted access, allowing users to only access the shared item in the workspace.

Limit access

You can limit viewer access to data using row-level security (RLS), column-level security (CLS) and object-level security (OLS). With RLS, CLS and OLS, you can create user identities that have access to certain portions of your data, and limit SQL results returning only what the user's identity can access.

You can also add RLS to a DirectLake dataset. If you define security for both SQL and DAX, DirectLake falls back to DirectQuery for tables that have RLS in SQL. In such cases, DAX, or MDX results are limited to the user's identity.

To expose reports using a DirectLake dataset with RLS without a DirectQuery fallback, use direct dataset sharing or apps in Power BI. With apps in Power BI you can give access to reports without viewer access. This kind of access means that the users can't use SQL. To enable DirectLake to read the data, you need to switch the data source credential from Single Sign On (SSO) to a fixed identity that has access to the files in the lake.

Protect data

Fabric supports sensitivity labels from Microsoft Purview Information Protection. These are the labels, such as General, Confidential, and Highly Confidential that are widely used in Microsoft Office apps such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to protect sensitive information. In Fabric, you can classify items that contain sensitive data using these same sensitivity labels. The sensitivity labels then follow the data automatically from item to item as it flows through Fabric, all the way from data source to business user. The sensitivity label follows even when the data is exported to supported formats such as PBIX, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF, ensuring that your data remains protected. Only authorized users can open the file. For more information, see Governance and compliance in Microsoft Fabric.

To help you govern, protect, and manage your data, you can use Microsoft Purview. Microsoft Purview and Fabric work together letting you store, analyze, and govern your data from a single location, the Microsoft Purview hub.

Recover data

Fabric data resiliency ensures that your data is available if there is a disaster. Fabric also enables you to recover your data in case of a disaster, Disaster recovery. For more information, see Reliability in Microsoft Fabric.

Administer Fabric

As an administrator in Fabric, you get to control capabilities for the entire organization. Fabric enables delegation of the admin role to capacities, workspaces, and domains. By delegating admin responsibilities to the right people, you can implement a model that lets several key admins control general Fabric settings across the organization, while other admins who are in charge of settings related to specific areas.

Using various tools, admins can also monitor key Fabric aspects such as capacity consumption.

Audit Logs

To view your audit logs, follow the instructions in Track user activities in Microsoft Fabric. You can also refer to the Operation list to see which activities are available for searching in the audit logs.

Capabilities

Review this section for a list of some of the security features available in Microsoft Fabric.

Capability Description
Conditional access Secure your apps by using Microsoft Entra ID
Lockbox Control how Microsoft engineers access your data
Fabric and OneLake security Learn how to secure your data in Fabric and OneLake.
Resiliency Reliability and regional resiliency with Azure availability zones
Service tags Enable an Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI) to allow incoming connections from Microsoft Fabric

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