Data fabric is being hailed by analyst firm Gartner as the next generation data management architecture and predicts that by 2024, 25% of data management vendors will provide a complete framework for data fabric .
Data fabric democratizes data access across the enterprise, at scale. It is a single, unified architecture – with an integrated set of technologies and services, designed to deliver integrated and enriched data – at the right time, in the right method, and to the right data consumer – in support of both operational and analytical workloads.
Data fabric combines key data management technologies – such as data catalog, data governance, data integration, data pipelining, and data orchestration.
Business drivers
Data fabric serves a broad range of business, technical, and organizational alignment drivers. Here's the business drivers:
Reducing time to insights and making more informed decisions, by pipelining data into data lakes and warehouses reliably and quickly.
Gaining a real-time, 360-degree view of any business entity– such as a customer, claim, order, device, or retail outlet – to achieve micro-segmentation, reduce customer churn, alert on operational risks, or deliver personalized customer service.
Lowering the total cost of ownership to operate, scale, maintain, and change legacy systems by incrementally and quickly modernizing these systems.
Data fabric for mesh architecture
Data mesh architecture discussed in an earlier post in more details addresses the four key issues in data management:
Data scattered among scores, and at times hundreds, of legacy and cloud systems, making it difficult to achieve a single source of truth
Speed and volume of data, that data-centric enterprises have to deal with
Data hard to get to, when access often requires data engineering
Lack of communication between business analysts, operational data consumers, data engineers, and data scientists.
Data fabric is well suited to mesh design because it builds an integrated layer of connected data across a broad range of data sources for an instant, holistic view of the business, to both analytical and operational workloads.
Keep an eye on data fabric!