Your data landscape matters.
That’s true across your entire organization, where data creates a foundation for decision-making. But it’s especially the case in FP&A, where finance teams are under pressure to do more than just report results. They’re expected to forecast with confidence, model scenarios quickly and guide strategic decisions across the business.
And yet many finance teams still operate on fragmented data—pulling numbers from ERP, CRM, HR and operational systems that don’t naturally connect. When data is siloed like this, Finance ends up spending their time reconciling instead of advising.
The prevalence of this problem is clear from Vena’s State of Strategic Finance 2025 report, where 36% of respondents said accessing the data they needed from multiple source systems was their finance team’s top reported challenge for planning. Solving data issues like those is critical if Finance wants to expand the strategic impact of their FP&A function.
The good news is, we’ve seen a path forward that can bridge these critical data gaps—and Microsoft has built it.
What Is Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft’s unified data platform. First announced in 2023, Fabric has become the fastest growing data and analytics platform in Microsoft’s history, with over 70% of Fortune 500 companies adopting it. It brings data storage, transformation, analytics and governance into a single environment—reducing the need for disconnected tools and custom integrations.
Instead of maintaining multiple isolated data pools, organizations can operate from a shared, governed data foundation.
I often describe the opportunity around Microsoft Fabric as a move from individual water wells in every yard in the neighborhood to a central, managed reservoir. The plumbing still matters—but the source becomes unified and controlled.
A Shift from the Status Quo
There are several key differences that make Microsoft Fabric’s approach to data distinct.
To connect data sources, for instance, organizations typically rely on a series of integrations, customized to each application and the system you want to connect to. Or, companies may rely on an iPaaS (integration platform as a service) provider to connect multiple applications together. Either way, each department connects their key systems to share data between them—but every department still lives in its own silo within the company as a whole.
As a solution, that data may be consolidated within a data warehouse, with ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes bringing disparate data together—gathering data from multiple sources, cleaning and converting it.
There are challenges to this approach, however, such as unreliable data, inefficient workflows, bottlenecks, misplaced data and high maintenance requirements.
Microsoft Fabric provides another solution, creating a central storage repository that combines ETL processes with an expanded list of capabilities that also include data warehousing, data modeling, reporting and more.
The Microsoft Fabric Data Environment
As an AI-enabled, cloud-based data platform, Fabric consolidates data from across sources, eradicating silos and allowing you to integrate data in whatever way works for your team. In doing so, it democratizes data, reduces data duplication, facilitates data movement and creates a consistent experience that connects teams and improves decision-making across the organization.
Microsoft’s security measures also give you confidence that there’s built-in governance following each piece of data wherever it’s used, so nothing sensitive gets into the wrong hands.
This creates a strong data environment for finance teams.
Why Is Microsoft Fabric an Opportunity for Finance Teams?
If your organizational data is effectively separated into a series of water wells, Finance likely has the biggest well in the business.
And that financial data is critical to making decisions business-wide—meaning how it's handled and shared is also critical.
This makes Microsoft Fabric particularly advantageous for finance teams, for one specific reason: decision quality. Planning, forecasting, consolidation and scenario modeling depend on timely, trusted data. So, when financial and operational data are unified in one governed location, Finance can focus less on gathering information and more on interpreting it.
Fabric creates a more coherent data environment—one where governance and access can scale together.
All of this means there are greater opportunities for insights when using Microsoft Fabric as the data foundation for Finance. A more integrated data environment also better enables AI adoption and creates a stronger environment for collaboration across departments.
As a whole, Microsoft Fabric adds efficiencies for data centralization, without many of the problems of traditional data warehouses and ETL.
3 Steps for Introducing Microsoft Fabric Into Your Finance Operations
Your roadmap to Microsoft Fabric integration begins with these three steps:
1.Align Early with IT
In many organizations, IT is already evaluating or implementing Fabric. While Finance doesn’t need to own the platform, they should be part of these conversations early.
2. Lead with a Finance Use Case
By partnering with IT, Finance can begin to use Fabric to ground data infrastructure choices around finance pain points, in order to tackle challenges like planning complexity, forecast variability or scenario modeling, for example.
3. Layer Governance and Workflow on Top
A unified data foundation still requires a planning layer that supports workflow management, auditability and scenario modeling.
That’s where a platform like Vena can help, by translating unified data from a source like Microsoft Fabric into structured financial plans and decisions, becoming the planning canvas from which Finance operates.
And Vena is leading the charge when it comes to unlocking Microsoft Fabric for FP&A, offering six pre-built, secure Microsoft Fabric data connectors—including the only pre-built Microsoft Fabric connector for Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O (Finance and Operations).
Integrating Your Data—No Matter the Environment
At Vena, we think Microsoft Fabric offers exciting new possibilities for Finance. But, we also support a broad range of integration approaches across ERP systems, data warehouses and cloud platforms.
But when Microsoft Fabric is in place, it becomes a powerful accelerator—allowing Finance to leverage a unified, governed data foundation without rebuilding your planning processes from scratch.
This allows you to access deeper insights and ensure you’re using accurate data across your planning, forecasting and reporting needs. So, however you choose to connect your data, Vena can quickly become your single source of truth across your FP&A function.
The way we see it, Finance is the hero of this story. Fabric is the infrastructure. And when the two align, data investment translates more directly into measurable business outcomes.
