Why Is Data Fabric Essential For Your Organisation?

Organizational data is becoming more dynamic with time and due to the usage of multiple types of applications, data management has become harder for organizations. Data-driven organizations that experience perpetual growth or upscaling always come across two major problems and these are data accessibility and data silos.

This is a growing problem in today’s world and top MNCs and conglomerates have all started investing in more advanced technologies for managing and monitoring their data and applications. Data fabric provides a solution for this problem by allowing various types of data including both unstructured and structured to be utilized by different systems or a single application. With the help of a data fabric, we can enable data to be accessed by multiple applications or systems at the same time.

How? This is because a single instance of data can exist in multiple locations but point to the same physical resources. Let us think of a data fabric as a space without any fixed shape that connects multiple data points to various locations such as the cloud, analytics tools, and other applications. However, this space is not limited and unlike data silos, can be scaled or connected to different systems.

Data fabrics introduce fluidity in data management and provide a holistic approach to data storage, data processing, and data management in general. This data management solution also reduces data governance and compliance issues by providing a standardized way for data to be shared or accessed by both external and internal teams. 

Data is essential for operations, production and analytics. Data fabrics allow companies to adopt an all-in-one solution for hosting and managing the different types of data that will be accessed for various business uses. Data fabrics ensure that the right data can be accessed at the right time, regardless of where it is located and the data type.

For example, data from a manufacturing unit can be needed by the production team to understand the daily output while this data can also be required by the analytics team to help derive crucial business insights that can help improve the performance of the company. In a similar way, an application may be using or accessing different types of data generated from different sources. Data fabrics foundationally make it easy for data to be passed around across a network or from one component to another without any limitation. 

What is a Data Fabric?

Data fabrics can be defined as architectural setups that enable companies to use their data more effectively and improve data accessibility. It is a consistent data management framework that reduces data isolation and various data management complexities. Data fabrics promote data governance, automated quality control, automated data integration, automated data discovery, and self-service data consumption. With these architectural advantages, organizations can use their data faster than ever for any purpose such as real-time data analytics. 

Data fabrics offer a united data ecosystem that allows organizations to increase data consistency and data quality while also reducing compliance risk. Organizations do not need to worry about data being compromised or misused and can go ahead with connecting all of their organizational applications and data. 

Data fabrics are unaffected by physical locations, IT architecture, data usage, process pipelines, or deployment platforms. There are no chances of data being stored in silos that leave them unable to be utilized to derive further value with processes such as analytics. Also, data fabrics heavily reduce the need for manual data management and provide a central access point for resource and settings management.

These are the four main components of a data fabric:

• Data Processing
• Data Orchestration
• Data Ingestion
• Data Governance

Why is Data Fabric Important?

Data fabric helps remove manual data integration and allows organizations to maximize the value of their data. Also, data is kept free-flowing in the data network and can be located and utilized by any approved application. With traditional data integration methods, there are drawbacks such as the inability to use the data in real-time or the lack of universal transformations. 

The importance of data fabrics grew as it became harder for organizations to meet their data goals. Organizations face daily challenges in data integration, data processing, and data transformation from multiple sources. Data fabrics change this by improving data accessibility and allowing personnel to use the data they require at any given time.

Data-driven organizations have IT environments with a variety of technologies, systems, applications, and microservices. Thus, companies cannot utilize their business data effectively without unifying their data architecture. For example, many organizations still store data in applications that can be considered to be siloed.

Data silos do not allow data to be interchangeably used and accessed by multiple applications. Using siloed systems requires companies to take additional measures such as hiring dedicated personnel and manually copying or consolidating this data to other sources or systems. Even then, the organization would still need to do manual data deduplication so that duplicate copies of the data can be removed for improved data quality and accuracy in analytics or operational tasks.

A huge percentage of organizational data remains unused by companies and firms and data fabric is the solution for increasing data usability. Data fabrics also are extremely helpful in multi-cloud data environments.

Why are Data Fabrics Essential for Organisations? 

Data fabrics provide organizations with a holistic environment that provides a unified data management solution that is simpler to use. This also removed the need for multiple architectures to promote data accessibility. A data fabric can help maximize the value of an organization’s data as well as save time for employees who frequently access and utilize the data.

Here are some important reasons why data fabrics are absolutely crucial for companies and businesses:

• Automates data quality processes and reduces risk
• Provides data in real-time regardless of the location and system
• Simplifies data management and data governance
• Enables the use of both unstructured and structured data in various formats
• Helps in applying corporate policies and ensures that only trusted data is delivered
• Accelerates the delivery of business insights by automating data delivery and simplifying accessibility
• Removes unnecessary data silos and allows organizations to make full use of the data
• Reduces data integration problems and the need to use multiple data integration tools, thus promoting digital transformation
• Helps in reducing costs through optimization and accurate data sourcing
• Improves data accessibility throughout different sources, applications, and locations

Data fabric is essential for reliable data management in today’s world. With this new approach to data governance and automated data integration, we are now able to use organizational data to its maximum capacity. Data fabrics fundamentally provide us with a consolidated view of and a central access point for all the data that is being stored and used across the company’s resources.

Also Read: How blockchain technology can prevent frauds