By Amit Gautam, Co-founder and CEO, Innover
Traditional data integration practices are failing to keep up with the changing demands of businesses that are centered on real-time connectivity, self-service, automation, and holistic transformations. While the collection of data does not pose a significant challenge, organizations face the heat when integrating, processing, curating or transforming data with other sources. As per Gartner, the mismanagement of data puts businesses on the back foot by as much as $13 trillion every year.
The complete extent of the impact is still unknown as 60% of businesses don’t know how much bad data actually costs them because they don’t measure the impact. It is here that Data Fabric, a modern-day end-to-end data integration, and management solution pervades challenges and enables businesses to overcome their data management woes to use data to its full potential powering business agility and accessibility, and growing demand for real-time analytics streaming. Gartner defines Data Fabric as a design concept that serves as an integrated layer (fabric) of data and connecting processes. A data fabric utilizes continuous analytics over existing, discoverable, and inferenced metadata assets to support the design, deployment, and utilization of integrated and reusable data across all environments, including hybrid and multi-cloud platforms.
“The Data Fabric Market size is expected to grow from USD 1.0 billion in 2020 to USD 4.2 billion by 2026, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26.3% during the forecast period.”- MarketsandMarkets.com
Current practices such as data lakes or data warehouses used for managing data are technology intensive sans data-centric. Data lakes or warehouses are compartmentalized as disparate functions concentrated on individual factors such as extraction, storage, and insights making it difficult to get a unified view of data. Besides, the use of these data management architectures is often time and cost-intensive. In today’s dynamic digital environment where huge amounts of data are generated at the drop of a hat, businesses cannot be constrained by delays in data access and processing. Data Fabric as new-age data integration and management architecture standardizes data-management practices and practicalities across cloud, premises, and edge devices.
Here’s how Data Fabric does it
Data Fabric as a solution is robust, secure, unifies data silos, and is primed for the future enabling businesses to optimally utilize data to their advantage.
Overview of the Data Fabric solution:
-Optimizes data management by enhancing the quality of data, ensuring the availability of information to the right user at the time of need complementing it with automated insights derived from available data.
-Data fabric is a perfect solution for businesses with a global presence, drawing from multiple data sources and facing multiple complex data issues.
-It is primed to face the changing business dynamics impacted by improving connectivity and increasing data from multiple devices and services.
-The solution works as an agile model allowing changes to systems, can be customized as per need and is operational across operating and storage systems.
-Is an economical, scalable solution that does not require extensively trained or expensive staff.
-Secure and compliant, Data Fabric, aptly maintains accessibility and real-time flow of information.
-Derives real-time insight from copious amounts of data
Using Data Fabric
Though Data Fabric as a practice has been part of discussions for almost a decade, its emergence as a prominent solution has been expedited due to the increase in data volumes and changing data regulations. Data consumption and regulations are two quintessential elements businesses must command to create a successful data fabric solution.
Here’s how some of the businesses are utilizing Data Fabric:
Agile automation driving innovation
One of the data fabric’s valuable attributes is its ability to read metadata and learn what data is used. Its real value exists in its ability to make recommendations for more, different, and better data, reducing data management by up to 70%. As per Gartner data fabric reduces integration time by 30% while improving deployment time by 30%. Handy insights available on the go complemented by an agile data management process make data fabric a perfect aide in helping businesses innovate at speed.
A 360-degree view of the customer
Data predominantly exists in silos within applications, so it is not optimally utilized. Data fabric integrates data across multiple channels, platforms, and users making it available to data practitioners as and when required. The integration of data derived from silos into a data fabric enables businesses to get a 360-degree view of the user’s digital footprint. This synchronized view of the customer across touchpoints, channels, and applications provides businesses with the much-needed understanding of the user or customer enabling them to make amends and drive a superior experience.
Data governance, security, and compliance
Data has emerged as an invaluable asset that can not only be used to power businesses but can also be put to the wrong use for individual benefit. With stringent regulatory norms around data handling and management in place, data security, governance and compliance need dedicated attention. Data fabric can significantly improve security by integrating together data and applications from across physical and IT systems. It enables a unified and centralized route to create policies and rules. The ability to automatically link policies and rules basis metadata such as data classifications, business terms, user groups, roles, and more, including policies on data access controls, data privacy, data protection, and data quality ensures optimized data governance, security, and compliance.
Data Fabric architecture is the future
Changing business dynamics require businesses to be ahead of the curve by virtue of aptly and actively using data. Data fabric is a data operational layer that weaves through huge volumes of data from multiple sources and processes it using machine learning enabling businesses to discover patterns and insights in real-time. This capability of Data Fabric is a boon for modern-day data-driven businesses that are faced with rapidly evolving business conditions. Businesses need to migrate from traditional practices to modernize and bolster their data practice using Data Fabric architecture to better comprehend their business needs and stay ahead of the competition.
