The Microsoft Cloth Group Convention returns to Las Vegas this week—larger and higher than ever. Thanks to our attendees, audio system, clients, and devoted groups for making FabCon 2025 an occasion to recollect.
Microsoft Cloth is a unified knowledge platform that continues to rework companies worldwide, with greater than 19,000 organizations and 74% of Fortune 500 firms leveraging Cloth. At FabCon, clients from around the globe will share how they’re pushing the boundaries of knowledge at scale and unlocking new potentialities for enterprise innovation.
The London Inventory Trade (LSEG), for instance, is leveraging Cloth to unify their knowledge estates and effectively course of their knowledge:
“Microsoft Cloth has been pivotal in LSEG’s knowledge platform modernization journey. With Cloth Spark because the core engine powering our buyer going through enterprise knowledge platform, LSEG manages massive volumes of time essential monetary markets knowledge that require advanced knowledge high quality and transformation guidelines, executed at scale and with constant service ranges. Combining this with the broader Cloth eco-system has opened up new and thrilling buyer experiences and AI-powered alternatives.”
—Phil Withey, Head of Structure, LSEG Microsoft Companions
Equally, Worldwide Office Group (IWG) is revolutionizing its strategy to knowledge integration:
“Microsoft Cloth was a sport changer due to its skill to create shortcuts with out bodily shifting knowledge from one place to a different. Earlier than, if I needed to incorporate three sources, I needed to create pipelines to usher in the information. That pipeline had a value. The information motion had a value. With Cloth, it’s two clicks and that’s it.”
—José Viegas, Senior Knowledge Architect, IWG
We’re at all times listening and studying to additional allow buyer successes like these by delivering the most recent improvements throughout the information property. See how clients around the globe are utilizing Cloth to rework their groups and industries.
New capabilities coming to Microsoft Cloth
At this time, we’re enhancing the Cloth expertise by unlocking new potentialities by key improvements designed to assist strengthen safety and harness the ability of AI to streamline knowledge workstreams like by no means earlier than:
Introducing OneLake safety—an {industry} breakthrough in knowledge safety
Managing granular knowledge safety throughout a number of purposes and engines is advanced, typically leading to extreme restrictions or unintentional knowledge exposures. That’s why we’re introducing OneLake safety—an {industry} breakthrough in knowledge safety. OneLake is Cloth’s unified knowledge lake, which seamlessly connects your whole multi-cloud and on-premises knowledge property. All of your groups get a single place to find, discover, and handle their knowledge—even inside apps like Microsoft Groups and Excel.
Now with OneLake safety, you may outline entry permissions as soon as, and Cloth will implement it persistently throughout all engines. Knowledge house owners can create safety roles, refine permissions, and management entry on the row and column ranges to securely share knowledge. For instance, you may grant entry to solely sure folders, tables, and even rows in a lakehouse—limiting Personally Identifiable Data (PII) whereas retaining different knowledge obtainable. This safety propagates robotically, so whether or not you question the information in SQL or visualize it in a Energy BI report, you may solely see what has been approved. Try the next demo to see OneLake safety in motion:
We’re thrilled to share that OneLake safety might be obtainable in preview inside a couple of months. Within the meantime, in case you are thinking about attempting OneLake safety in your workspaces and offering suggestions, please go to this early entry sign-up web page.
Empowering agentic AI by integrating Cloth knowledge brokers with Azure AI Foundry
Knowledge performs a essential function in agentic AI, enabling AI brokers to function independently, make knowledgeable choices, and take significant actions. That’s why we’re increasing capabilities and deepening integrations between our knowledge and AI platforms.
Knowledge brokers (previously referred to as AI abilities) in Microsoft Cloth are AI-powered assistants that may be taught, adapt, and ship insights immediately, serving to groups make higher data-driven choices. Cloth knowledge brokers not solely retrieve knowledge from OneLake, however they will cause over and perceive the information—what it means, the way it’s structured, and when it’s related.
Beginning at the moment, organizations can use Azure AI Foundry to attach custom-made, conversational brokers, created in Cloth. AI builders can now use Azure AI Agent Service to securely floor AI agent outputs with enterprise information in Cloth knowledge brokers, in order that responses are correct, related, and contextually conscious. By combining Cloth’s refined knowledge evaluation over enterprise knowledge with Azure AI Foundry’s cutting-edge GenAI know-how, companies can create customized conversational AI brokers leveraging area experience.
“Cloth knowledge brokers are a strong and value-adding software in knowledge environments. Appearing as a conversational functionality layer, we are able to use knowledge brokers to ‘speak’ to our knowledge, perceive it, and derive totally different insights in assist of our day by day choice making.”
—Maureen Tan, Head of AI Middle of Experience, NTT DATA
Copilot and AI capabilities in Cloth might be obtainable for all SKUs
We’re excited to announce that Copilot and AI capabilities might be enabled for all paid SKUs in Cloth, making these instruments accessible to everybody throughout the coming weeks. This growth is pushed by your suggestions concerning the influence Copilot in Microsoft Cloth has had in your productiveness, and the way broadening entry to Copilot would profit extra groups. With this newest replace, clients on F2 and above can use Copilot and AI capabilities, resembling Cloth knowledge brokers, to streamline workflows, generate insights, and drive impactful choices.
Seamlessly migrate your knowledge to Cloth
We’re excited to announce the preview of a migration expertise natively constructed into the Cloth UI, enabling Azure Synapse Analytics (knowledge warehouse) clients to transition seamlessly to Microsoft Cloth. With a built-in, clever evaluation, guided assist, and AI-powered help, this expertise simplifies migration of code and knowledge whereas serving to clients unlock Cloth’s unified knowledge basis, AI-driven analytics, and enhanced efficiency—with out the complexity of conventional migrations.
Microsoft Cloth Group Convention
Be part of us this yr in Las Vegas for FabCon 2025.
Further Cloth improvements
Along with the above, we’re introducing a collection of updates throughout the Microsoft Cloth platform and its workloads. These developments will additional progress our commitments to our 4 core Cloth pillars:
- A whole, AI-powered knowledge platform.
- An open, AI-ready knowledge lake.
- Empowering AI-enabled enterprise customers.
- A mission-critical basis.
Cloth is an entire AI-powered knowledge platform
Cloth is a unified, AI-powered knowledge platform that fosters seamless collaboration throughout your group. At this time, we’re sharing new enhancements and capabilities that may additional strengthen the Cloth platform and workloads, which can unlock much more potentialities to your knowledge initiatives.
Platform enhancements:
- The preview of Command Line Interface (CLI) in Cloth introduces a brand new terminal that permits customers and admins to execute instructions throughout Cloth utilizing interactive prompts or scripts, enabling a seamless, code-first expertise with out counting on clicks.
- The preview of latest CI/CD enhancements expands assist throughout the Cloth platform, together with variable libraries for workspaces, Service Principal assist for GitHub, and Deployment Pipelines Cloth APIs Part II.
- The preview of Person Knowledge Features introduces a approach for builders to implement and reuse customized enterprise logic in Cloth knowledge science and knowledge engineering workflows, streamlining improvement and enhancing effectivity.
- The final availability of the Terraform supplier for Cloth, to assist clients guarantee deployments and administration duties are executed precisely and persistently.
- The final availability of Tags, which permits customers to optimally describe gadgets they personal, and assist improve group and discoverability of knowledge in Cloth.
Knowledge integration enhancements:
- The final availability of Apache Airflow job empowers clients to run their Apache Airflow DAGs in Microsoft Cloth, with a serverless Apache Airflow runtime.
- The final availability of the Copy job introduces a brand new simplified expertise for purchasers who want to maneuver knowledge between totally different knowledge sources and locations. It additionally introduces assist for batch and incremental knowledge motion.
- The preview of key orchestration enhancements is now obtainable, enabling the creation of metadata-driven pipelines that orchestrate Dataflow Gen2 (CI/CD) parameterized invocation from Knowledge Pipelines
Actual-time intelligence enhancements:
- The final availability of Cloth Occasions transforms Cloth into an event-driven platform. Customers can leverage the Actual-Time hub to find and subscribe to Cloth Occasions throughout OneLake, Cloth jobs, and Workspaces.
- The preview of latest eventstream connectors which permits customers to usher in knowledge from extra non-Microsoft sources, together with Climate, Solace PubSub+, ADX Desk Streamify, MQTT v5, Occasion Grid Namespaces, and Confluent with Schema Registry.
Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Science enhancements:
- The preview of Autoscale Billing for Spark helps optimize Spark job prices by offloading Knowledge Engineering workloads to a serverless billing mode. Capability admins can set a max capability models (CUs) restrict in capability settings, guaranteeing Spark jobs use devoted CUs as an alternative of shared Cloth Capability.
- The preview of AI capabilities offers highly effective capabilities to use LLM-powered transformations, resembling summarization, classification, and textual content era to your OneLake knowledge—all with a single line of code.
Associate/ISV integrations
- At Ignite, we introduced the final availability of the Workload Growth Toolkit (WDK) and launched ISV workloads that deliver new capabilities and worth to our joint clients. We’re excited to now announce the final availability of Cloth workloads from Osmos, Profisee, and PowerBI.ideas, together with public previews of latest workloads from Celonis, CluedIn, Neo4j, Lumel, Statsig, and Striim within the Cloth Workload Hub. As well as, CluedIn additionally introduced a public preview of its integration with Open Mirroring in Cloth.
Cloth is open with an AI-ready knowledge lake
Along with OneLake Safety, we’re additionally making enhancements to OneLake, together with:
- A contemporary get-data expertise with OneLake catalog integration in Microsoft Excel (in Workplace Insiders Quick) allows customers to discover the OneLake catalog immediately from Excel, increasing accessibility past the prevailing Microsoft Groups integration.
- Coming quickly, we’re releasing the final availability of on-premises knowledge gateways assist for Amazon S3, S3-compatible sources, and Google Cloud Platform permits customers to create shortcuts to on-premises knowledge sources hosted behind a firewall or inside a Digital Non-public Cloud.
- The enhancements for cross-tenant sharing, together with the flexibility to share a number of tables without delay, Lakehouse schemas, in addition to tables from Cloth SQL databases, KQL databases, and OneLake shortcuts (coming quickly). This shared knowledge can now be accessed by way of SQL analytics endpoints and semantic fashions.
- An up to date model of the Cloth Hyperlink to Dataverse preview allows even sooner and safer knowledge virtualization from Dataverse, the information platform for the Energy Platform and Dynamics 365, because of back-end enhancements. We’re additionally asserting a brand new Mirrored Dataverse choice in Cloth. Study extra about each bulletins.
Cloth empowers each enterprise person with AI capabilities
Cloth empowers enterprise customers to shortly uncover key insights in a Energy BI report by merely asking Copilot. With AI-enhanced Q&A and intuitive visuals seamlessly embedded in Microsoft 365 apps, everybody can higher perceive and act on their knowledge with ease. To additional empower this mission, we’re asserting that:
- The preview of Direct Lake semantic fashions in Energy BI desktop, which permits customers to construct Energy BI semantic fashions for lightning-fast reviews that question knowledge immediately from OneLake with out scheduling refreshes and with out knowledge duplication. This characteristic may even allow customers so as to add in tables from a number of Cloth artifacts in the identical Direct Lake semantic mannequin for final reusability of OneLake knowledge.
Cloth offers a mission-critical basis
Our closing promise is which you can confidently deploy and handle Microsoft Cloth with category-leading efficiency, prompt scalability, shared resilience, and built-in safety, governance, and compliance. To additional that mission, we’re excited to introduce a number of enhancements to our mission-critical promise, together with:
Mission-critical basis enhancement with Microsoft Purview:
- Coming quickly, the preview of Microsoft Purview for Copilot in Energy BI. The mixing will allow discovery of knowledge dangers resembling delicate knowledge in person prompts and responses, defend delicate knowledge with Insider Danger Administration to determine and examine dangerous AI utilization, and govern AI utilization with audit, eDiscovery, retention insurance policies, and non-compliant utilization detection.
- Coming quickly, we’re increasing Purview Knowledge Loss Prevention insurance policies Cloth protection past lakehouses and semantic fashions, to now additionally embrace Cloth KQL databases and mirrored databases. This can permit safety admins to detect delicate knowledge uploads, resembling SSNs, and set off automated actions in additional sources.
- The preview of Knowledge Observability throughout the Unified Catalog to analyze the connection between knowledge merchandise and any property (together with Cloth property) related to them to determine the basis reason for high quality points.
Getting began with Microsoft Cloth
New clients can check out every little thing Cloth has to supply by signing up for a free 60-day trial—no bank card data required. Learn to begin your free trial.
When you’re contemplating buying Cloth and need assistance selecting a SKU, we’re excited to share {that a} new Cloth SKU Estimator will quickly be obtainable in public preview. Keep tuned.
Watch the motion on the Cloth Convention
To see these bulletins in motion, register and safe your spot at the moment by Wednesday April 2, 2025. With over 200 expert-led classes, you may be a part of hundreds of attendees who’re diving deep into Microsoft Cloth, exploring improvements in AI, databases, analytics, enterprise intelligence, and extra.
Discover extra assets for Microsoft Cloth
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Arun leads product administration, engineering, and cloud operations for Azure Knowledge, which incorporates databases, knowledge integration, large knowledge analytics, messaging, and enterprise intelligence. The merchandise in his groups’ portfolio embrace Azure SQL DB, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure MySQL, Azure Knowledge Manufacturing facility, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Service Bus, Azure Occasion Grid, Energy BI, and Microsoft Cloth.
