The Fabric Access Puzzle: Cracking Permission Problems with Confidence

Permissions in Microsoft Fabric are a double-edged sword: get them right and you enable a seamless, self-service data culture; get them wrong and you face a constant barrage of "Access Denied" tickets or worse a significant data leak.
This session is designed to take the guesswork out of security administration. We begin by deconstructing the "Fabric Security Stack," examining how Tenant settings, Workspace roles and Item-level permissions (like Share and Read) interact with the granular controls of the OneLake Data Access layers.

Moving beyond the basics, we will dive into the most common "puzzle pieces" that trip up even seasoned administrators, such as the difference between "Member" and "Contributor" roles when interacting with Spark notebooks and how the "ReadAll" permission impacts downstream SQL analytics endpoints.
You will learn how to audit effective permissions to see exactly what a user can or cannot do across the entire environment. The session concludes with a practical roadmap for implementing a "least-privileged" architecture that doesn't hinder collaboration, equipping you with a systematic troubleshooting framework to identify, isolate and resolve access issues in minutes rather than hours. Leave the trial-and-error method behind and gain the confidence to build a secure, well-managed and truly collaboration-ready Fabric environment.

Key takeaways: - Deconstruct the Fabric Security Hierarchy: Identify how Tenant settings, Workspace roles, Item-level sharing and OneLake Data Access Roles layer together to determine a user's "effective permissions." - Master the Troubleshooting Framework: Apply a systematic 5-step "detective" methodology to quickly diagnose and resolve common "Access Denied" errors across Lakehouses, Warehouses and Notebooks. - Architect for Secure Collaboration: Design a scalable permission strategy that balances "least-privileged" security principles with the need for high-speed team collaboration and self-service analytics.