Educational institutions face the growing challenge of turning vast amounts of data into actionable insights. However, when information remains siloed within individual departments, it can lead to missed insights, limited access, and lost collaboration. As AI reshapes how we work and learn, the ability to break down silos and harness data across your entire institution isn’t just an advantage—it’s essential. Microsoft Fabric empowers educational institutions to maximize the value of their data on a secure, compliant platform and make organizational data AI-ready.
Unlock the value of your data with Fabric
Fabric gives your teams the AI-powered tools they need for innovative data-informed decision-making and reporting projects. Fabric has many key features that help you get the most value from your organizational data.
With Fabric you can:
- Govern and protect seamlessly
- Bring your institution’s data together
- Empower everyone with access to valuable insights
- Fuel your AI innovation
Fabric not only enables innovation but also saves money. A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study commissioned by Microsoft in 2024 highlights the cost savings and financial benefits of Fabric:
- 379% return on investment
- Payback in less than 6 months
- 25% increase in data engineering productivity
- 90% reduction in data engineering time related to searching, integrating, and debugging
Learn how Fabric can provide additional data insights and contribute to cost savings.
Govern and protect your data
The effectiveness of your AI relies on responsibly managing and securing a wide range of data, including educational records, financial information, and research data. Schools need a unified solution to govern and protect their entire data estate while unlocking its full potential. Fabric, seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Purview, provides comprehensive data governance and protection. It simplifies management, secures sensitive information with role-based access controls, and ensures compliance with privacy regulations. By unifying governance and security, institutions can protect personally identifiable information (PII), prevent data loss, and share insights securely and compliantly.
Play the video to learn how Fabric provides you with an end-to-end analytics platform.
Ensuring compliance is a pivotal step in becoming AI-ready. As you grow and expand your school’s AI innovation, it’s essential to design a strategy that strikes a balance between fueling paths to innovation and addressing pressing security priorities.
Auburn University turned to Microsoft and its comprehensive, flexible tools to develop approaches that would help them move forward and pivot as new technologies emerge. With tools like Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Sentinel providing security, Auburn developed more ways for people to explore AI’s possibilities safely.
Read more about how Auburn University is exploring new ways of using AI.
Additionally, Coquitlam School District faced challenges with data compliance and privacy, especially with unstructured data from teachers. To address these challenges, Coquitlam implemented Fabric and Microsoft Purview. These platforms transformed the district’s data management systems, turning unstructured data into actionable insights. Play this video to learn more about how Coquitlam School District’s achieved their goals around security and educational, operational, and organizational excellence.
Read Coquitlam’s full story and play the video to explore how this district is building a more secure infrastructure and enhancing data insights.
Bring your institution’s data together
Data management is most effective when it’s unified, governed, and compliant. As modern data platforms evolve with generative AI, the potential for data-driven decisions and operational optimizations grows. Fabric and OneLake unify your data and analytics to streamline transformation, deepen insights, and drive AI innovation. OneLake acts as a hub to build AI apps powered by your data, making it easy to virtualize and aggregate data from any source.
Fabric works with OneLake to centralize data, enabling seamless integration and improving data quality. Your institution can take your data from storage to Fabric and then to Azure AI Foundry portal, where you can build custom AI apps.
Play the video to learn how Fabric and OneLake simplify data management and reduce data duplication.
As your institution introduces dynamic data tools like Fabric and OneLake, you’ll be able to transition to an end-user, self-service model, empowering staff members to access the data they need when they need it, fostering a culture of data literacy.
The University of South Florida (USF) has accelerated data-driven decision-making by empowering its teams to access information and enriched business insights through a self-service approach. By preparing client technologists to do self-service analysis, USF has taken an important step on its ambitious digital transformation journey.
Read more about how USF is empowering employees to derive insights in minutes.
Empower everyone with access to valuable insights
Access to actionable insights is critical for driving meaningful change and improving decision-making across educational institutions. However, when data remains inaccessible to non-technical users, opportunities for innovation are often lost. Faculty and staff need intuitive tools to transform raw data into insights that support collaboration and institutional growth.
Fabric addresses these challenges by democratizing data access. Seamlessly integrated into Microsoft 365, it allows staff to create reports with drag-and-drop tools and leverage AI to uncover trends and opportunities. Securely connected and certified datasets ensure trusted insights, while centralized databases enable leaders to drive growth and support strategic initiatives.
Politecnico di Milano exemplifies this transformation by leveraging Microsoft Graph Data Connect and Power BI to uncover objective workforce sentiment insights that surpass the limitations of traditional surveys. By accessing near real-time sentiment data, organizations can make quicker, more informed decisions, fostering collaboration and creating supportive work environments—all while maintaining data privacy. This innovative approach highlights how modern tools can revolutionize data accessibility and empower institutions to derive actionable insights at scale.
Read more about how Politecnico di Milano is redefining data-driven collaboration and innovation.
Enhance your AI innovation
Leveraging generative AI streamlines productivity, improves quality, and increases value. Fabric, the data platform for the AI era, empowers your data professionals to unify data and build AI models on a single foundation. You can even use Copilot in Fabric to automate data insights, uncovering trends and enabling faster interventions. This improves everything from academic outcomes to resource management, all within a transparent and trustworthy AI platform.
Using machine learning to generate actionable insights has enabled Broward College to respond to students’ needs more quickly. The technology allows the team to process data in minutes that would previously take days to complete—and to isolate complicating or potentially misleading factors, like the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student retention.
Read more about how Broward College uses Microsoft data tools to identify and respond to students’ needs.
Fabric is more than a tool—it’s a powerful platform to unlock new possibilities. By centralizing and securing your data, you can drive better outcomes for students, faculty, and your entire educational community.
Ready to start innovating? Begin your data innovation journey and achieve cost-savings by signing up for a free 60-day Fabric trial.
Explore the “Make your data AI ready” training plan to master Microsoft Fabric. Learn to ingest, transform, and store data, and use Power BI to unlock insights for smarter decisions and better educational outcomes.
