Understanding OneLake: A New Approach to Data Lakes
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Simplifying data management with OneLake
Organizations have always faced challenges in managing and analyzing their data effectively. Data lakes were introduced as a solution to consolidate data into one place, breaking down silos and enabling easier analysis. However, building and maintaining data lakes has been a complex task. Companies often ended up with multiple siloed lakes for different departments or domains, leading to duplication, inefficiencies, and governance challenges.
OneLake changes this paradigm by offering a unified, SaaS-based data lake that eliminates the need to build and manage infrastructure yourself. It’s designed to simplify how organizations store, access, and analyze their data across domains and clouds.
How OneLake works
Unified data access without duplication
OneLake uses shortcuts* to virtualize data across domains and clouds. A shortcut is essentially a symbolic link that points from one data location to another. This means you can access data stored in various locations—whether in Azure, AWS S3, or on-premises—without moving or duplicating it. For example:
- You can create shortcuts to make warehouse data part of your lakehouse.
- You can consolidate data across workspaces or domains without changing ownership or creating redundant copies.
This approach ensures that existing storage systems remain intact while seamlessly integrating into OneLake’s unified namespace.
* Shortcuts are symbolic references (e.g., Linux symlinks, DFS, cloud federated access).
Multi-cloud and cross-platform capabilities
OneLake is a multi-cloud SaaS data lake. It connects with major platforms like Azure, AWS S3, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Dataverse, Snowflake, Databricks, and even on-premises systems. This flexibility allows organizations to unify their entire data estate without being locked into a single vendor.
Organizing your data estate
OneLake supports logical organization through domains and workspaces:
- Domains: These group related data by business areas like sales, marketing, or finance. Each domain can have its own admins who manage governance settings for their specific area.
- Workspaces: These are lightweight containers where teams can independently manage their projects while contributing to the same unified lake. Workspaces inherit governance rules from the tenant admin but allow workspace admins to set additional access controls as needed.
This structure enables federated governance while maintaining flexibility for individual teams.
Global reach with regional compliance
For organizations operating in multiple countries, OneLake provides global coverage while meeting regional compliance requirements. Workspaces can be assigned to specific regions so that all associated data resides within that region. Underneath the hood, OneLake uses Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 accounts in different regions but virtualizes them into one logical lake. This eliminates the need for managing separate storage resources while ensuring compliance with local regulations.
Storage and compute separation
OneLake separates storage from compute so that different analytics engines can work on the same dataset without duplication:
- All tabular data is stored in open formats like Delta Lake/Parquet.
- Multiple engines—such as Spark, T-SQL, KQL, and Analysis Services—can read the same dataset directly without importing or duplicating it.
This approach enables what Microsoft calls „one copy,” where a single copy of the data can power multiple use cases across different tools and teams.
Governance made simple
Governance is built into OneLake from the ground up. When data lands in OneLake:
- It automatically participates in features like lineage tracking, protection policies, certification workflows, and catalog integration.
- Admins can certify certain datasets as official sources while allowing other users to contribute additional datasets. This ensures visibility into all organizational data while promoting trusted sources for reuse.
Why it matters
Traditional approaches to building and managing data lakes often result in complexity—multiple silos, duplicated datasets, and governance challenges. OneLake simplifies this by providing:
- A single logical lake for your entire organization.
- Seamless integration with multi-cloud platforms and on-premises systems.
- Built-in governance tools that ensure security and compliance.
- The ability to work with one copy of your data across multiple analytics engines.
By leveraging shortcuts for virtualization and mirroring capabilities for unifying external datasets into OneLake’s namespace, organizations can streamline their analytics workflows and reduce operational overhead.
Executive summary
OneLake represents a shift in how organizations approach their data estates. By combining simplicity with flexibility—through features like shortcuts, domains, workspaces, and multi-cloud integration—it addresses many of the pain points associated with traditional data lakes.
As organizations continue to scale their AI initiatives and analytics workloads, solutions like OneLake provide a foundation for unifying disparate datasets while enabling teams to collaborate effectively across geographies and platforms.
If you’re looking to simplify your data management strategy while maximizing value from your existing infrastructure, it’s worth exploring what OneLake can offer.
Estera Kot
CTO Leadership
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