What is a Data Fabric and Why Would You Want One?

What is a Data Fabric and Why Would You Want One? Reading Time: 2 minutes

More data sources, more silos, more complexity, and constant change. Data architectures are challenged to keep pace, creating a big problem for today’s data-driven organizations—one that puts your business at risk. 

In response, data-driven organizations are implementing data fabrics. One of the hottest analyst and vendor terms in data management today, data fabrics are among data and analytics fastest-growing trends.

What is a Data Fabric?

A data fabric is a modern distributed data architecture that includes shared data assets and optimized data fabric pipelines that you can use to address today’s data challenges in a unified way.

Sounds Great, But… 

But your organization’s demand for data is exploding and your data landscape is extensive and complex. What data, sources, and use cases does a data fabric support? The list includes: 

• Data for All Users and Use Cases: Provides timely, consistent, and trusted data for your wide range of analytic, operational, transactional, and governance use cases, as well business self-service users. 
• Data from Any and All Sources: Accesses, combines, and transforms both in-motion and at-rest data from across your diverse, distributed data landscape using metadata, models, and pipelines.
• Data that Spans Any Environment: Flexibly spans your distributed on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

How is a Data Fabric Different from other Data Architectures you might Consider?

Data fabrics embrace today’s more distributed data landscapes and take advantage of more modern data management and integration capabilities. With your data fabric, you can:

• Support More Use Cases: One virtual place to go for analytic, operational, transactional, governance, and self-service data.
• Span More Data Types and Methods: Data-in-motion and data-at-rest from on-premises, cloud, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and third-party sources.
• Better Optimize Data Fabric Pipelines: Your data fabric pipelines include an optimized combination of intelligent, converged data and metadata management, integration and delivery capabilities. 
• Provide Greater Deployment Flexibility: Your data fabric can deploy flexibly in phases across your distributed on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.      

How Will a Data Fabric Deliver Value?

 A data fabric makes sense from a technical perspective, but you also need to make your business case. Your data fabric can provide business value in a number of ways:  

• Fuel Your Data-Driven Business: Support multiple, diverse users and use cases with a modern distributed data architecture, shared data assets, and optimized data fabric processes.
• Accelerate Value Realization: Accelerate time to value by unlocking your distributed on-premises, cloud, and hybrid cloud data—no matter where it resides—and delivering it at the pace of your business.
• Empower Your People with Timely, Consistent, and Trusted Data: Democratize data access to arm business users with all the data required to make faster and more accurate business decisions.
• Optimize Your Business Processes: Feed your business processes with the timely data required to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. 
• Benefit from Technology Innovation Sooner: Embrace new data and analytics technology advancements such as data science, real-time data, and the cloud faster to stay ahead of your competition.
• Save Time and Money: Streamline data and metadata management, integration, and delivery processes and pipelines via an optimized combination of intelligent, converged capabilities that embed AI/ML and business self-service.
• Govern and Comply With Confidence: Ensure proper data governance and control so you can deliver the right data at the right time, securely, and in compliance with your ever-changing regulatory landscape. 

A data fabric is a modern distributed data architecture that includes shared data assets and optimized data fabric pipelines that you can use to address today’s data challenges in a unified way. Click To Tweet

Take the Next Step

Now that you know what a data fabric is and why you would want one, your next step is to learn more about how to evaluate your data fabric options. Here are some resources: