Data Fabric: how do they work and does my organisation need one?

With improved data quality, businesses across all industries are driving better decision-making, streamlining operations, and staying ahead of the competition. In this blog, we explore what a data fabric is, how it works, and why organisations need one. 

What is a data fabric?

As per Gartner’s definition, a data fabric is “an emerging data management design for attaining flexible, reusable, and augmented data integration pipelines, services, and semantics. A data fabric supports both operational and analytics use cases delivered across multiple deployment and orchestration platforms and processes. Data fabrics support a combination of different data integration styles and leverage active metadata, knowledge graphs, semantics, and ML to augment data integration design and delivery.”

Put simply, a data fabric is an end-to-end solution that facilitates the integration of several cloud environments and data pipelines. Not only does it combine data to achieve a single source of truth, but it enables best practices for data governance across various data management principles.

How does it work?

A data fabric simplifies complex distributed architectures by transforming data into a readily usable format through processes such as unification, cleansing, enrichment, and security.

It’s like a “behind-the-scenes” organiser, constantly analysing existing information to help organisations put their data to better use. 

The aim? To ensure that data from various sources can work together smoothly, whether its stored on-premise or in the cloud. By harnessing the combined power of people and technology, it enables users to access data in its original place, or consolidates it as required. By finding and linking data from different sources, it constantly uncovers insights and connections between data sources to support better-informed, data-led decision making.

Why do organisations need a data fabric?

In the realm of data management, data fabrics play a pivotal role in helping organisations unleash the full potential of their data assets. To have data availability and access, data standards, governance, and data engineer productivity, organisations need a data fabric.

With a data fabric, businesses can reap the benefits of:

Integrated, unified data: Data fabrics seamlessly combine data from various sources such as on-premise systems, cloud environments, and other applications. This integration plays a crucial role in keeping data systems current, as it allows organisations to dismantle data silos and gain a comprehensive view of their data landscape.

Semantic enrichment: By organising heterogeneous data into a unified business semantic model, data fabrics significantly enhance the quality of data assets. This means data is structured and labelled consistently, making it easier for businesses to comprehend and analyse. Particularly in scenarios where companies deal with diverse data types, semantic enrichment is vital for extracting meaningful insights.

Enhanced accessibility: By providing organisations with a centralised platform to access their data across hybrid and cloud environments, data fabrics improve company-wide user accessibility. This centralised access improves the agility of data usage and empowers businesses to make quicker, data-driven decisions.

Scalability and flexibility: With the exponential increase in data volumes, scalability becomes imperative for modern data systems. Cloud-based solutions like SAP Data Fabric are designed to evolve with businesses, adapting seamlessly to changing data requirements and scaling up and down as required.

Interoperability: SAP Data Fabric allows for seamless connectivity with other SAP applications and third-party solutions. This interoperability means businesses can leverage their existing technology investments while embracing new innovations.

The key to modern, simplified and unified business data systems

Equipped with a data fabric, finance teams can obtain a complete picture of business financials, production teams can automate manual processes across the supply chain, and decision-makers can tap into real-time insights. 

In fact, data fabrics are so instrumental in enhancing operations, that Gartner predicts “by 2025, active metadata-assisted automated functions in the data fabric will reduce human effort by half and quadruple data utilisation efficiency.”