Security-first Finance: How Azure, Dynamics 365 and Fabric Protect Data and Simplify Compliance

For finance teams, speed is the mandate and trust is the currency. You’re closing sooner, forecasting more often, and sharing insight with a broader audience — all while guarding the most sensitive data in the company. The best path forward is a security-first finance model where access, lineage, and monitoring move with every dataset, report, and workflow.

Below is a practical, Microsoft-aligned approach. We begin with the security challenges faced by finance teams, then show how Azure, Dynamics 365, Fabric, and Purview help reduce exposure and make evidence easy to produce.

The Current Security Reality for Finance

Attackers follow the money and the data, and AI has changed the cadence on both sides. Verizon’s latest Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) highlights two people-driven risks you already see on the ground: a meaningful share of employees routinely use generative AI at work, and synthetically generated phishing content has doubled in two years , which raises the odds of a believable lure landing in inboxes.

Budget pressure is real, too. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach summary pegs the global average breach cost at about $4.44M (lower than 2024, but still material), with faster detection and strong governance as the levers that move the number.

For finance leaders, the key point is clear: design your operating model so that access, lineage (the trace from source to report), and monitoring follow the data. This reduces leakage paths (including those in the AI era) and shortens the gap between an audit request and a credible response. The question then shifts from which tool to buy to how to maintain access, lineage, and monitoring with the data as the pace accelerates.

Why Finance Feels It More Acutely

Finance widens the surface area faster than most functions, which is why the same risks show up sooner and hit harder. Modern finance spans multi-entity structures, distributed teams, third-party exchanges, and self-service analytics. Extracts and side copies multiply, roles drift over time, and compliance spans both internal controls (segregation of duties, approvals, audit trail) and external obligations (privacy and industry attestations). The common thread is that when identity, definitions, and data paths are governed end to end, exposure drops, and producing evidence gets easier.

Principles you can defend upstairs

We recommend you anchor your security posture to a few non-negotiables:

• Least privilege aligned to real duties.
• One identity across systems so access changes take effect everywhere.
• Encryption everywhere with the option to hold your own keys.
• End-to-end lineage so you can show how a number moved from source to board pack.
• Continuous monitoring so drift and misconfigurations surface early.

These are all technology-agnostic. The Microsoft cloud makes them practical at scale.

How Microsoft Supports the Principles

Microsoft maps cleanly to those non-negotiables, so you apply the same rules from ERP to analytics.

Azure: security foundation

Microsoft Entra ID anchors single sign-on and conditional access across Dynamics 365, Fabric/Power BI, and Microsoft 365. Data services encrypt at rest and in transit; for your highest-sensitivity datasets, you can use customer-managed keys in Azure Key Vault or Managed HSM, keeping key custody with you. Defender for Cloud provides unified posture and threat monitoring across hybrid and multicloud environments.

Dynamics 365 Finance: governed access and an audit-ready trail

Security follows a model that finance teams recognize: roles, duties, and privileges mapped to tasks such as posting journals, approving payments, or releasing invoices. Approval workflows support separation of duties, and activity is logged so you can answer “who did what, when” in minutes. The net effect is cleaner access and fewer bespoke controls to maintain.

Fabric and Power BI: governed analytics, not copy-and-paste

Finance data lands once in OneLake and inherits permissions as it moves from raw to refined to report. Power BI adds row-level security and usage logs so leaders consume governed views in Power BI or Excel instead of exporting to personal shares. Purview can sit alongside to provide a catalog, sensitivity labels, and end-to-end lineage from source table to visualization.

The AI Angle You Should Address Explicitly

AI changes two day-to-day exposures — what people paste into prompts and how credible phishing looks—so the safest answer is to keep identity and governance in the loop. You can counter both with governed identity and AI-aware controls:

2. Copilot respects permissions. Copilot presents only what a user is already authorized to access and operates within your tenant’s identity and sensitivity-label boundaries; usage is auditable.
3. AI-scoped Microsoft Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for “no-summarize.” With Purview, you can prevent Copilot from processing (summarizing) items labeled Highly Confidential, while still allowing links/citations for users who already have rights. That keeps crown-jewel content out of generated responses.

A note about how Copilot treats Finance data: In Microsoft 365, Copilot runs inside your tenant boundary and honors the same permissions that govern SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Dynamics data. Prompts and responses aren’t used to train foundation models, and usage is auditable. So, Copilot can speed up the work, but it never widens access — it can’t show or summarize anything a user isn’t already allowed to see.

Bringing It Together: One Identity, One Permission Story, One Evidence Trait

When ERP, analytics, and collaboration share identity and governance, control stops relying on side agreements. For example:

• A controller’s role in Dynamics 365 maps cleanly into Fabric and Power BI, so a team change requires one update that propagates.
• Labels and policies defined in Purview follow sensitive fields into analytics workspaces, keeping protection intact as data moves.
• Lineage plus usage and approval logs form a coherent trail from origination to decision, which shortens audits and reduces disruption during close.
• The business impact is tangible: fewer unmanaged copies, less debate over “which version is real,” and more time for analysis and action.

How Velosio Can Help

We bring finance and IT together around a workable plan. You end up with fewer seams, clearer evidence, and a security posture that scales with your modernization agenda.

Security in finance is non-negotiable. With Azure, Dynamics 365, Fabric, and Purview working as one, protection and proof travel with the data wherever it goes — so the close stays calm, forecasts stay current, and trust keeps pace with your ambitions. Reach out to our team to start the conversation.

This blog post is from our webinar, “Top Five Ways to Solve Data Management Issues in Finance Departments.” For more information on the subject, watch the webinar below: