The opportunities to improve the way we work and maximise the value of data are continually evolving.
Data Fabric is not just the latest industry buzzword – it’s a way forward for any business wanting to better create added value for their customers, stakeholders and staff.
According to Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022, Data Fabric is “a design concept that serves as an integrated layer (fabric) of data and connecting processes”. It continuously identifies and connects data from disparate applications to discover unique, business-relevant relationships between the available data points.
Put simply, a data fabric is an architectural pattern. It aims to address the challenges within a complex data landscape by establishing a more innovative environment for collecting, assessing and processing data efficiently.
Examples of Data Fabric
Examples of use include augmented data integration and greatly improved data sharing across heterogeneous data sources.
The design of a data fabric overcomes the issues associated with siloed datasets, a lack of access and numerous data sources which have been key elements preventing businesses from efficiently leveraging data.
Data fabric supports multiple capabilities – data engineering, pipeline management and orchestration, governance and lifecycle management to name a few – it is modular and enables scaling across distributed multi-cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments.
Gartner predicts that by 2024, data fabric deployments will quadruple efficiency in data utilisation and cut human-driven data management tasks in half.
Benefits of Data Fabric:
- Enhanced availability of trusted data and data-driven insights
- Better ability to leverage the cloud in full as data fabric supports all data environments and systems
- Provides built-in data quality, data governance capabilities, bolstered by machine learning augmented automation
- A future-proof data management infrastructure as new technologies can be added to the data fabric to further enhance the service
- Innovative capabilities to accelerate business growth and digital transformation
- Significantly reduces costs and risks.
With more services and processes migrating online, the volume and complexity of data is only going to increase. If leveraging that data is important to you, consider factoring data fabric into your strategy sooner rather than later.
