Data Fabric

Data Fabric: Everything you need to know  

The world of data is brimming with fancy jargon that is sometimes too complex, intertwined or has overlapping meanings. Enter Data Fabric. The term “data fabric” was believed to be coined in the early 2000s by Noel Yuhanna, a senior analyst and well-known technology research service provider from Forrester. Other sources, however, pointed out that Gartner, Forrester’s main tech research rival, introduced the concept. Since then, the use case of data fabric has evolved and is now regarded as the future of modern enterprise data computing.  

Gartner defines data fabric as a design concept that serves as an integrated layer (fabric) of data and connecting processes. It employs a set of technologies and services that helps deliver enriched and integrated data using a single, unified architecture. The data fabric concept envisions data that is made available at the right time, in the correct method, and to the right user. Data fabric also provides agility as it allows storing, modifying, and accessing data almost instantaneously.  

The adoption of data fabric has received a boost as organizations are increasingly adopting digital storage environments such as the cloud. As the business world continues its path toward digitalization, the role of data fabric is expected to get more spotlight. Read on as we delve deeper into the possible applications and use cases of data fabric mechanisms on businesses and governments.  

Richer customer information and insights  
Data fabric can be used to formulate insights from customer activities and interactions with their roles to get a broader understanding of the customer. Data such as real-time sales activities, probable revenue realization, and customer onboarding time could be analyzed and turned into meaningful service improvements.  
  
Data democratization  
Any organization, whether prominent or budding, or even a company struggling to cope with the IT requirements, can harness the benefits of data fabric by turning the once-elusive data pool (silos) into a more open, robust, and real-time data-sharing. Data fabric is said to be the first technology to truly end data silos due to its interwoven approach to data management.   
  
  
Compatibility with hybrid environments  
Data fabric, with its “fabric-like” system, is not dependent on a single platform, tool, or service. It can be multi-platform or bidirectional without sacrificing consistency from its sources. The solution creates a consolidated “fabric” for insights generation by ingesting data from multiple sources spread across environments.  
  
It requires less IT intervention compared to traditional warehouses.  
Traditional data warehouses require a lot of power and human resources to run, and a lot more is needed if you want a nicely-maintained and crisp system. Data fabric solves the issue as it generally relies on a set of prebuilt and pre-configured components and is hosted on the cloud via an experienced service provider. This practice eliminates IT involvement from almost all data production and processing stages.  
  
Enhanced regulatory compliance  
By exploiting the robust data governance capabilities enveloped within the data fabric architecture, an organization can track where the data came from, how it was collected, who accessed it, when, and what changes have been made. Utilizing these features can significantly increase compliance and fault-finding in any organization. Combined with AI, data fabric can support automation for the effective classification of data assets, sensitive data detection, and masking.  
  
Enterprise intelligence  
Data fabric architecture streamlines the consolidation of information from internal and external sources, helping companies, regardless of size, to obtain a bird’s-eye view of the organization. This feature can help a struggling business go back to green by spotting corporate bottlenecks and implementing necessary mitigation efforts in real-time.