11 May 2020 What is a data fabric?

Data Fabric is an architecture and set of data services that provide consistent capabilities across a choice of endpoints spanning on-premises and multiple cloud environments. Data Fabric simplifies and integrates data management across cloud and on-premises to accelerate digital transformation.

Data Fabric lets organizations take control of data residing anywhere, anytime. Data Fabric encompasses the technology architecture and IT services that enable this capability by simplifying and integrating data management processes across all sources and access points of data. Specifically for hybrid cloud infrastructure deployments that require organizations to manage data access, security, control, and visibility using multiple different data management frameworks, Data Fabric works as a single and consistent data management framework.

Your data is anywhere and everywhere, in every form imaginable. And it’s growing by the minute, stored in public clouds, private clouds and on-premises. Your teams leverage it to do their jobs. Your business depends on it to survive and thrive. And now you can design your data fabric to deliver it where, when, and how you need it.

Think of data fabric as a weave that is stretched over a large space that connects multiple locations, types, and sources of data, with methods for accessing that data. The data can be processed, managed, and stored as it moves within the data fabric. The data can also be accessed by or shared with internal and external applications for a wide variety of analytical and operation use cases for all organizations including advanced analytics for forecasting, product development, and sales and marketing optimization. The goals are many: to improve customer engagement through more advanced mobile apps and interactions, comply with data regulations, and optimize supply chains, to name a few.

Succeeding in this environment and becoming a data-driven organization is not easy.  There are many roadblocks on the way to becoming a digital leader. As organizations use more and more applications, their data becomes increasingly siloed and inaccessible beyond its initial scope.  While legacy infrastructures and systems only exasperate the problem, data can become siloed when trying to migrate to the cloud. It can be especially difficult to share data between data residing on different public clouds (e.g. AWS and Azure) or between a public cloud and on-premise data center, or storing it all in a cloud data warehouse.  

A typical company today has data in multiple on-premise locations as well as multiple public and/or private clouds. The data is both structured and unstructured and maintained in a wide variety of formats file systems, relational databases, SaaS applications, etc.  And, processing that data spans a multitude of technologies, from batch ETL or ELT processing to changed data capture to real-time streaming.  With almost three-quarters of organizations (74%) using 6 or more data integration tools, it becomes very difficult for organizations to be nimble and quickly ingest, integrate, analyze, and share their data and incorporate new data sources.

Implementing a data fabric to manage the collection, governance, integration, and sharing of data can help organizations meet these challenges and become a digital leader. A data fabric is not a one-off fix to a specific data integration or management problem.  It is a permanent and scalable solution to manage all of your data under a unified environment.