Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels help organizations manage their sensitive data and meet regulatory and compliance requirements. Sensitivity labels are widely adopted by enterprises today to label and protect content in Microsoft 365 apps such as Excel, PowerPoint, Word files, and Outlook emails.
Introducing the new Sensitivity Bar in Power BI and Fabric
The new sensitivity bar in Power BI and Fabric allows users to conveniently apply sensitivity labels to reports, datasets, and other Power BI items alongside new Fabric items such as Lakehouses, Warehouses, KQL databases, Notebooks, and more, ensuring that important and sensitive data can be easily labeled with sensitivity labels to achieve compliance with regulations and requirements in just a few easy steps:
Go to the top bar of any item and click the sensitivity bar or the item’s name.
From the labels that are assigned to you by your organization’s compliance admin, select the most suitable sensitivity label based on the content and your organization policies.
Finally, the sensitivity label will be applied to the item. 
The sensitivity bar in Power BI and Fabric is designed to be similar to the Office experience. The labels that users apply to Office files are the same as the sensitivity labels applied in Power BI and Fabric and use the same policies, colors, and encryption icons from the Microsoft Purview compliance center to provide users with a familiar, easy-to-use interface.
*Encryption in Power BI and Fabric is currently enforced only on files (.pbix) and is inherited to all supported exports.
Mandatory vs optional labeling in your organization policy
When your organization’s compliance admin enables mandatory label policy, users will have to label their items upon creation and will not be able to remove sensitivity labels. Mandatory policy will be indicated to the user with the icon.
When no mandatory policy is enforced in your organization, then labeling is optional and will look like this.
Default label policy in Fabric
When your organization’s compliance admin enables default label policies, they define a baseline label to be applied to Power BI and Fabric. Unless changed, the default label is set automatically on all Power BI and Fabric items upon creating new items.
Changing or removing a sensitivity label
Changing a sensitivity label can be easily done using the new sensitivity bar, just by selecting a different label. In a case when the label is protected, the user must have sufficient permissions to edit or remove the label. These permissions are not granted within Power BI or Fabric, they are granted by your organization’s compliance admin.
Automatically label your item’s downstream lineage
Labeling your entire item lineage is now easier in Fabric. As with Power BI, we’ve integrated downstream inheritance to help you easily label all your connected child items.
Now, when you apply a sensitivity label on a parent item (i.e., an item with connected child items) the same sensitivity label will be inherited to all connected items, thus maintaining the same sensitivity label across your data lineage.
This feature can easily be turned on in the Admin Portal for your entire tenant. Even if downstream inheritance is not turned on, child items will inherit the sensitivity label by default, unless this option is turned off for the item from its settings.
Accessibility
Microsoft Fabric’s sensitivity bar follows inclusive design principles, that will provide a clear user experience for people with disabilities to aid screen readers or other assistive tools and tab navigation.
A note about colors: users who have color vision deficiency might be unable to differentiate the various label colors without other cues. The new sensitivity bar takes this into account using the default configuration which would always show the label name alongside its colored icon, the sensitivity Bar’s colors support accessibility for color vision deficiency and including in dark mode support.
Licenses
In Power BI and Fabric, the admin must have a Pro license to enable information protection in their tenant, to apply sensitivity labels, you will require the following:
In Power BI – at least P1/P2 which are included in E5.
In Fabric – at least P1 which is included in E3.
Summary
The new sensitivity bar in Power BI and Fabric is an essential addition to already powerful data visualization and analytics tools. Whether you’re a data analyst, business professional, or researcher, this new experience can help you label and protect your data with ease.
Feedback
We’re always happy to hear any comments or feedback you may have regarding sensitivity labels in Power BI and Fabric. For any suggestions, please fill out this form.