What is a Data Fabric?
A data fabric is a modern data architecture that facilitates seamless data access management and sharing across an organization. Through a data fabric, data products and insights naturally emerge by analyzing metadata usage across critical systems and applications. A data product can be as simple as a file with specific attributes needed by a user – or as sophisticated as a solution that merges many data products and solutions to achieve a very specific outcome.
A data fabric is not a single solution or technology, but a combination of the following components that work together to create metadata-driven data products:
- Data integration techniques that capture all critical data continuously.
- Data preparation and data delivery processes that ensure data is discoverable, usable, and accessible.
- Recommendation engines that analyze metadata and suggest relevant data products or next best actions.
- Data orchestration for coordinated and automated workflows across various systems and platforms.
- Data governance to understand data properly and in compliance with regulations and business policies.
- Augmented data catalogs that automate metadata discovery and management with rules and recommendations.
- Metadata activation that improves and manages data operations with advanced alerts and recommendations.
- Knowledge graphs – or visual maps of relationships that help organize and retrieve information efficiently.
Why is a Data Fabric Important?
Data fabric addresses the following challenges:
As data continues to exponentially expand, organizations desire to automate more data management processes like data integration. With the rise in demand for more self-service data access, the manual processes to deliver these requests are not only expensive, but inefficient.
Data teams that leverage data have additional challenges. While trying to drive innovation, improve operations, or mitigate risk, data teams waste time trying to find what data already exists. They often duplicate data requests and are unaware of other data teams that may have similar data products that could be leveraged. Data that is available frequently is not well understood – users struggle with lineage, meaning, ownership, and being able to quickly profile data.
Organizations must also provide visibility and accountability around data privacy, security, and data policies that could put the company at risk.
In short, this leads to delayed responses, incomplete or inaccurate analysis, and lack of confidence in business decisions.
What are the benefits of a Data Fabric?
A data fabric architecture empowers organizations to eliminate silos, improve efficiency, and accelerate data-driven decisions by making metadata driven data products easily accessible and actionable for users.
Benefits include:
- Enable real-time access to critical data needed for data products while reducing operational costs with automated data integration pipelines.
- Improve business decisions and productivity with relevant data products that dynamically emerge from usage of your critical data.
- Reduce risk with centralized visibility and accountability around privacy, security, and data policies.
- Improve productivity with self-service access to data products that are discoverable, well understood, and available.
How Precisely Can Help
The Precisely Data Integrity Suite’s Data Integration service automates the integration of data from critical sources, including legacy systems, databases, and applications into your data fabric. By building resilient automated data pipelines, you can ensure that the right data is continuously available within your data fabric . architecture.
The Precisely Data Integrity Suite streamlines metadata management through its Data Catalog. The catalog provides intuitive card views for better metadata understanding. One way metadata is activated is through the Data Observability service of the Data Integrity Suite that profiles data and leverages machine learning intelligence to deliver proactive alerts that keep users informed of metadata changes that could impact the accuracy, relevance, or completeness of data products.
The Precisely Data Integrity Suite’s Data Governance service ensures oversight over data privacy and security. It establishes clear visibility, ownership, and accountability around data access, policies, quality, and business metadata, ensuring data assets or products are accurate, consistent, and fit for the purpose for which they are intended. This service adapts to the expansive needs of a data fabric, maturing governance approaches to meet centralized requirements.
The Data Integrity Suite promotes self-service data sharing of data products through the user-friendly Data Catalog, enabling users to easily find and understand data products via catalog card views. Coupled with the Data Governance service that delivers additional business metadata, users are empowered to request access or collaborate on data products that are relevant, trusted, and current for more immediate data-driven outcomes.
Data management programs like data fabric can lose focus in different ways. Sometimes it is as simple as not knowing how to get started...other times existing programs fail to document real business value. Precisely Strategic Services has deep domain and industry expertise that help your teams clearly articulate the strategy, build the business case, and track metrics that will quickly deliver value to your organization.