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Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Microsoft Fabric: where does the agent's data actually live?

Microsoft Fabric is a very large, very able data platform. One capacity meter buys you Data Factory, Spark, a Delta warehouse, KQL streaming, and Power BI. It now buys the Fabric IQ workload too, with its ontology, graph, and agents. OneLake sits under all of it. Shortcuts pull in S3 and Google Cloud Storage. No copy needed. If your estate is already Microsoft, Fabric is the cheapest pick you will ever make. That's because it's mostly a pick you already made.

We do none of that. We are a checked data plane for the agents that read your data. Your instance is where we run. We tokenize datasets at ingest. Agents query the tokenized data over MCP. Reversing a token is a special, audited step. We recheck every checked tool call against the agent's current access first. Every choice lands in a hash chain you can check yourself. Here is the split, rows we lose too.

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DataShield vs Microsoft Fabric at a glanceEight questions regulated buyers ask us. Scored from each vendor's public docs. DataShield vs Microsoft Fabric at a glance Eight questions regulated buyers ask us. Scored from each vendor's public docs. DataShield Fabric Tamper-evident audit chain you can verify Authority re-checked on every governed tool call Break-glass access for agents Reversible tokenization at ingest Runs on your own infrastructure Lakehouse, streaming, warehouse and BI in one platform OneLake zero-copy shortcuts across clouds Published pricing you can act on shipped partial / roadmap not offered Sources at the bottom of this page.

The short version

Pick DataShield when

  • The data plane has to sit on your own system. Fabric is SaaS only. There's no on-prem edition. No private build. No exception.
  • Someone will ask you to prove an agent's log was not edited. Not search it. Prove it. Run the verifier and see what that looks like.
  • You need to pull an agent's access mid-session. You need the very next tool call to fail closed.
  • The agents that matter are not Microsoft agents. The values they read should be tokens, not names.

Pick Microsoft Fabric when

  • You need a real lakehouse. Spark, a Delta warehouse, KQL streaming, 200-plus Data Factory connectors, Power BI. We ship none of it. We're not pretending to.
  • Your data is scattered across clouds. OneLake shortcuts read Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage in place. No pipeline to build.
  • You want one semantic layer for the whole business. Fabric IQ builds an ontology from semantic models you already run, plus a graph you can traverse.
  • The money is already spent. Fabric rides the Azure bill and the Microsoft relationship. That argument has won more deals than any feature ever will.

Bottom line: Fabric is where the data lives. We are where the agent's authority and the proof live. The split matters most when the data cannot live in someone else's SaaS.

Feature by feature

Competitor cells describe what Microsoft's public docs say, as of the date above. If we got something wrong, email support@myorg.ai. We'll fix it, and credit you.

What mattersDataShieldMicrosoft FabricEdge
Audit evidenceA SHA-256 hash chain, with Ed25519-signed checkpoints. The checkpoints chain too. A check names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion, or truncation. Try the verifier.Agent interactions flow into Purview Audit and eDiscovery. The data agent doc calls those checks "currently in preview." It warns that interactions "might be logged and discoverable." We found no tamper proof.◆
Agent authorizationEvery checked tool call passes three gates. A scope ceiling. An access tier. A check for revoke. Then it can go. The call fails closed.A four-layer order: org, role, developer, then user intent. It's a real design. It resolves at setup time, not per call. The agent runs on the asking user's login.◆
Break-glassScoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. It auto-revokes. No one can quietly delete it from the log.Nothing agent-shaped that we could find in the Fabric docs. Emergency access is an Entra and Azure job.◆
GDPR erasureWe crypto-shred each subject's keys. We add an ISO 27560 consent receipt. The chain still checks out after the subject is gone.Purview offers retention and lifecycle rules over OneLake. That's a workflow. It isn't a crypto check.◆
Tokenization and data handlingSet, join-safe tokens at ingest, held in a vault we can reverse. Plus quasi-identifier generalization. Dates cut to year, decade, or age band. ZIP codes cut to 3 or 4 digits. Phones, SSNs, and emails cut too. Each column gets a measured score for the cut. Reversing a token is a special, logged step.Labels and DLP decide who may read a value. The raw value stays in OneLake. We wrote up that gap here.◆
MCP and agentsMore than 200 MCP tools across Ontology, Auth, Corpus and Lighthouse. Auth issues MCP tool tokens with a scope ceiling. It meters every call against the agent.A Microsoft Fabric MCP server exists, in public preview. It aims at AI-assisted builds over Fabric's public APIs and item definitions. It's a build-time helper. We found no MCP surface that serves checked data at runtime, with per-call access checks.◆
Deployment and hostingSelf-hosted, in your own cloud or data center. Or a dedicated single-tenant server we run. Docker images for Auth, Ontology, Corpus, and Lighthouse. Ed25519 audit-signing keys stay on your instance, in a key directory you control. An unknown key fails closed. KMS or HSM custody is a built seam in Auth, not a shipped link. HMAC tokenization keys sit in your setup today, not in a KMS.SaaS only. Microsoft's own line is "You don't need an Azure account to use Fabric." That's a feature for most buyers, and a wall for a few. There's no self-hosted edition.◆
Platform breadthIngest, catalog, profile, transform, snapshot, tokenize, match, retrieve. No Spark. No streaming engine. No BI tool. No lakehouse.Data Factory, with more than 200 connectors. Spark notebooks. A Delta-native warehouse. Real-Time Intelligence, and Power BI too. It mirrors Snowflake, Databricks, and PostgreSQL into OneLake. This isn't close.◇
Semantic and ontology layerEntity types. A glossary that's built, not just linked. Typed lineage with per-hop access checks. Probabilistic record linkage behind masked golden views.Fabric IQ, in preview. It has an ontology item. It has a graph item. It has planning, and operations agents that act on live data. It builds ontologies from semantic models already in production. Broader than ours. They got to the word first.◇
Catalog and discoveryWe scan, profile, and classify a live PostgreSQL source in place. No rows leave it. That's against 129 field classes. Think PII, PHI, money data, and secrets. PostgreSQL today, not your whole estate.The OneLake Catalog covers every item in the tenant. Purview does classification and labeling underneath. Far wider than us.◇
PricingPublic model, plus a scoped instant quote, no sales call. You still answer a few questions to get a number.A clear SKU ladder from F2 to F8192, billed per second. Reservations save about 41%, Microsoft says. The dollar figures on the public page show as "$-." The page says prices "are estimates only and are not intended as actual price quotes."◈
Maturity signalsAuth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live in production. Guardian and Lighthouse have run since April 2026. SOC 2 is not yet certified. We say so.Microsoft. Every cert you can name, plus a global support org. More Fabric capacity runs today than we will see this decade.◇

◆ DataShield leads◇ Microsoft Fabric leads◈ comparable

Fabric claims come from learn.microsoft.com, the Azure pricing page, and the microsoft/mcp repository. We last checked 13 September 2026. We link them below, rather than work from memory.

Three things you get here that you won't get from a SaaS lakehouse

A data plane you can point at

Fabric has no self-hosted edition. For most buyers, that's the whole appeal. Think a hospital with a residency rule. Or a bank whose contract bans third-party processing. For them, it ends the talk. We ship Docker images for Auth, Ontology, Corpus, and Lighthouse. They run on your metal, with your keys. How we deploy.

Evidence, not a search box

Purview Audit is a good search box. It isn't proof. An auditor asks: were the March records edited? You get an export, and your word for it. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints. The verifier says what broke. Not just that something did. That's the trait EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers care about. We walked through the Fabric version of that problem in this write-up. Try the verifier, no signup.

Authority that can change mid-flight

An analyst leaves on a Friday. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. With DataShield, the next checked tool call gets rechecked against current access. It fails closed. Fabric's data agent inherits the asking user's rights, which is sound. But rights changes land on the schedule a token and a cache decide. How Auth does it.

Where Microsoft Fabric is genuinely stronger

Almost everywhere, if you go by surface area. Fabric is a lakehouse, a warehouse, a streaming engine, a BI tool, and a data-join suite. All under one capacity meter. OneLake makes them share storage, instead of copying it. Shortcuts read Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage in place. Mirroring pulls Snowflake, Databricks, and PostgreSQL into OneLake. No pipeline to write. The Fabric data agent is generally available. It's read-only by design. It routes a plain-English question to NL2SQL, NL2DAX, or NL2KQL. Or to Microsoft Graph. It picks based on the source. Then Fabric IQ layers an ontology and a graph over the whole thing. So agents reason in business terms. We build none of that. A buyer who needs it should buy it.

The push-back is narrow. It's about the last mile. Read the data agent limits page and the shape of the product comes clear. Responses cap at 25 rows and 25 columns. There's no unstructured data. It's English only. You can't change the model. A query fails if the source capacity sits in one Azure region. And the agent's capacity sits in another. Per Microsoft's own words, the Purview checks around those agents are "currently in preview." None of that is damning. It says this: a chat-style analytics feature, well built, inside one vendor's estate. It is not an authorization and proof layer for whatever agent your team wires up next quarter. Your regulator may ask: who let the agent read that column? Could the record of it have been changed? Fabric hands you a search result. We hand you a chain.

Questions worth asking both of us

These are the questions we'd want answered if we were the buyer. Ask them on every call, ours included.

Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?

DataShield: yes. Each record commits to the one before it. Checkpoints are signed and chained. A check tells deletion apart from truncation and from tampering. Run it at /verify. Fabric: agent interactions go to Purview Audit and eDiscovery. Those checks are marked preview in the data agent doc. We found no tamper-proof mechanism. Ask Microsoft to show you one.

What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?

DataShield rechecks access on every checked tool call. So a revoke lands on the next call. Fabric's data agent runs on the asking user's login. So the answer depends on Entra token lifetime, and how fast the rules recheck. Ask how long a compromised session keeps working after you pull access.

How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?

DataShield crypto-shreds each subject's keys. It issues an ISO 27560 consent receipt. Actor names in the chain are HMAC-committed. So the proof still checks out once the subject is gone. Fabric leans on Purview retention and lifecycle rules. Those are workflows over copies of data. Ask for the mechanism, not the workflow.

Does Microsoft Fabric support MCP, and do we still need DataShield?

Partly, and it depends. Microsoft ships a Fabric MCP server, in public preview. Plus a second one for Real-Time Intelligence. Here's what it does. It gives a coding agent access to Fabric's public APIs and item definitions. So it can help you build. It never touches live setups. That's useful. It is not a runtime data surface with a scope ceiling, a mid-session revoke check, and a sealed audit row per call. That's what we ship across Ontology, Auth, Corpus, and Lighthouse. Ask Microsoft where the per-call decision point is.

We already bought Fabric capacity. Why add anything?

Usually, you shouldn't. If your data belongs in OneLake, and your agents are Copilots, keep going. Three things bring people to us anyway. A residency or contract rule that bans a SaaS data plane, since Fabric has no self-hosted edition. An agent stack that isn't Microsoft. And an auditor who wants proof, not an export. One more real-world note: the Fabric pricing page shows the SKU ladder with the dollar amounts blanked. The licence rules bite below F64. There, Power BI viewers still need a Pro or PPU seat.

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

Not yet. We won't say otherwise. Auth is live, with a public threat model. Anyone can run our verifier. Guardian and Lighthouse have run in production since April 2026. Design-partner terms include source escrow. So a small vendor isn't a single point of failure. Details on the security page.

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