Organizations want to unlock value from data faster. But building a data platform from scratch is an intensive process. It requires deep technical expertise, time-consuming alignment on architectural principles, and a significant investment in infrastructure and governance. At ilionx, we saw how this process needlessly slows many organizations down. That’s why we developed the ilionx Data Platform Fabric (iDP Fabric): a ready-to-use technical foundation that drastically speeds up and simplifies the setup of a data platform on Microsoft Fabric.
What is iDP Fabric?
iDP Fabric is a pre-designed, technically robust implementation of a data platform built entirely on Microsoft Fabric. The platform was designed with one clear goal in mind: enabling organizations to extract value from their data faster and in a more sustainable way.
By leveraging metadata-driven automation and infrastructure-as-code, we can deploy the platform in a customer’s cloud environment within days. This significantly reduces the need for manual coding, which not only saves time but also minimizes the risk of errors.
But iDP Fabric is more than just technology. It is a collection of best practices, reusable components, development standards, and management functionality—built on the experience of dozens of successful data platform projects across a wide range of organizations.
From idea to execution in days, not months
Where many organizations spend months preparing the technical foundation of their data platform—designing the architecture, setting up development pipelines, and selecting governance principles—iDP Fabric accelerates these steps without skipping them.
For example, instead of building all ETL processes manually, iDP Fabric uses a data load generator that automatically creates load logic based on metadata. This makes it easy to adapt to different data sources and datasets, whether it’s a full refresh, incremental update, or data historization.
This approach ensures not only speed, but also consistency. Every dataset is handled in the same way, with standardized logging, error handling, and quality checks.
Built on lakehouse principles and medallion architecture
The technical and functional foundation of iDP Fabric is the medallion architecture, also recommended by Microsoft Fabric. This means data is processed through three layers: bronze, silver, and gold.
Bronze layer: a complete copy of the original source data, focused on retention and auditability, with support for historization (version history).
Silver layer: structured data, with concepts and entities modeled in a standardized data model.
Gold layer: contextual data products such as KPI reports or predictive models, tailored for tactical and strategic decision-making.
All layers are stored in Delta Parquet format on OneLake, ensuring high performance and seamless integration with other Microsoft tools in Fabric.
Flexibility and control in one
A major advantage of iDP Fabric is that it runs within the customer’s own Azure tenant. This means full control over data and infrastructure, with no vendor lock-in. At the same time, the platform is fully transparent: all code is accessible and customizable, giving organizations the flexibility to adapt or expand the platform to their needs.
iDP Fabric is also highly parameterized, making it easy to move between OTAP environments or toggle features on and off. Orchestration, logging, and security are standardized, ensuring reliable and secure operation in every environment.
Managed iDP: worry-free operations
After implementation, we offer Managed iDP, which allows organizations to hand over full platform management to ilionx. We take care of monitoring, security, updates, and incident handling. This means organizations can focus entirely on data use and innovation, without being distracted by technical details.
Versioning, incident handling, and data quality checks are all embedded in our management methodology—freeing up time and focus for strategic data initiatives.
Practical accelerators from real-world projects
What makes iDP Fabric truly powerful are the accelerators we’ve built over the years:
Connectors for common data sources like SQL Server, Oracle, AFAS, Exact, and Dynamics. These go beyond technical connectivity, ensuring data is read, processed, and validated correctly. Delta detection strategies to process only changed data. Depending on the source, this may be based on the last processed key, a processing timestamp, or direct dataset comparisons.
Generic logging and monitoring that provide insights into runtimes, errors, and performance.
Advanced orchestration to automatically manage dependencies between processes—perfect for complex data landscapes.
Full infrastructure-as-code with DevOps integration
Many organizations discover that Microsoft Fabric on its own is not sufficient to establish a sustainable data solution. Fabric needs to be part of a broader landing zone: a secure, manageable, and scalable foundation where aspects such as governance, security, and access control are properly ensured.
To deploy such a landing zone reliably and consistently, we use infrastructure-as-code. This allows the entire technical environment to be set up quickly and flawlessly – not only the data services, but also components like monitoring, security, networking, and access management.
In addition, we professionally implement version control, OTAP structure, deployment pipelines, credentials, and scrum boards using Azure DevOps and Azure Key Vault. As a result, iDP Fabric provides a mature data engineering environment right from day one.
Best practices that make the difference
What makes iDP Fabric unique is that it delivers not just technology, but also the methodologies needed to make a data platform truly successful, including:
- A proven agile project approach for data platform development.
- Power BI guidelines for effective visualization.
- The Enterprise Reporting Framework (ERF) for structured dashboards.
- The Practical Performance Measurement (PPM) method for impactful KPI selection.
- Templates for data models, dashboards, and documentation.
Everything is designed to not only provide a fast start but also ensure sustainable and effective growth.
iDP Fabric: a flying start and a solid future
With iDP Fabric, organizations gain not just a technically powerful platform, but also a proven approach. It accelerates implementation, prevents rework, improves data quality and insights, and lowers management costs.
In short: iDP Fabric is a solid foundation for any organization serious about becoming data-driven—without getting lost in technical complexity.
Curious how iDP Fabric can accelerate your data platform? Get in touch with our experts or visit www.ilionx.com for an introduction or demo.
