Businesses are in a fever of competition, thanks to the rise of AI, the drive down due to the cost of living crisis, and a myriad of other factors that make it harder to stay on top than ever before. You, as a business owner need to make smarter decisions, now. You need to know your audience better, now. You need to offer more, without increasing your costs, now.
The good news is that you can do all that and more just by leveraging the data that you already have. The more information at your fingertips, the more potential you have to use it for your gain.
Of course, massive amounts of data also becomes more unruly to manage and even understand. That’s where a data fabric comes into play.
Data fabric has been transforming the digital landscape, and it has become a key driver of digital transformation initiatives. This is especially true for large, international brands that have been around for decades (or even centuries).
What is data fabric’s role in this new age of information, you might ask? This guide covers everything that you need to know:
Data Fabric: An Introduction
If you haven’t heard of “data fabric” or have might have heard about a “data mesh” instead, then it’s first important to understand this concept as a whole.
You can think of a data fabric as covering your entire data network like a sheet (hence it’s name). It’s a system that makes it easier to access and use all of your datasets, allowing you to find information quickly, and for your AI or analytics tools to work more effectively.
In order to use a data fabric architecture, however, you do need to prep your data. Most businesses have datasets in multiple locations, stored online, on servers, in different offices, and so on. Cloud-based computing has done a lot of work towards centralizing your information, but unless you’ve gone in with the mindset that you’re going to specifically centralize your information, there’s likely data that’s been left behind.
Now, if you’ve heard about data mesh instead, and think it sounds incredibly simple, that’s because the goal of data mesh and data fabric is the same. The difference is a data fabric tends to be put together using existing 3rd party systems, and a data mesh is a custom, in-house designed approach.
For most businesses, you’ll want to start with a data fabric, then, after it’s in place, understand its limits and use those to help inform your R&D department while they make your data mesh.
Why is it So Important for Large-Scale Businesses to Implement a Data Fabric?
Data fabric is only for large companies. This is because it helps you sort through and put large datasets to work. Small and even many medium-sized businesses simply don’t have enough data for a data fabric per se, but they can still benefit from centralizing the data that they do have.
For larger companies, however, there are so many benefits of data fabric:
- Boost Your Data Governance: this increases data accuracy, and security and ensures you’re compliant with regulations. Currently, around 73% of polled companies today use multi-cloud-based accounts, and yet 98% of those say that using several cloud computing systems means that their security challenges have increased. Just centralizing your data alone can help with security. Using a data fabric can reduce security challenges.
- Improve Your Data Agility: Data fabric helps you adapt and respond quickly to market changes by giving you faster access to the information you need. Not only can you have all your information available in one source, but you can also use metadata to mark it up and make it more searchable.
- Increase Data Quality: One source of data makes it easy to manage disparate data sources. By improving the quality of the data you have access to, you can boost revenue and save on costs. For example, IBM determined that in the US, poor-quality data cost businesses $3.1 trillion every year.
What is Data Fabric’s Role in Supporting Digital Transformation Initiatives?
Investing in a data fabric solution and working towards a custom data mesh system requires a full overhaul of your business practices. Just as companies needed to go all in during the era of digitization, where they needed to digitize and upload all of their paper files, building a data fabric architecture will take a similar amount of effort.
To help you understand just why it’s imperative you make the switch from siloed data to a central data network that you can access with a data fabric, just have a look at what data fabric has done to help companies with their digital transformation initiatives:
● Unifies Your Data Access
If you need to log in to several different systems or accounts to get the data you need in your day-to-day, stop. Data fabric solutions today work to unify all your data access, so you only need one login to get to the data you need to do your job. Those in higher-up positions will have greater access, and those further down the career ladder will only be able to see and use the datasets they need for their role.
● Masters Your Data Governance
Data governance is essential in today’s world. You need to ensure that your data is accurate, or else your business will make decisions based on incorrect information. To minimize leaks, You need to ensure that your data access is limited. You also need to boost your security. Master data governance helps with all those goals, and data fabric makes it a breeze to implement.
● Speeds Up Your Analytics
Analytics and other digital tools like AI software all need as much data to work. If you miss datasets or don’t include all the legacy information you have, then your analytic insights aren’t going to be as in-depth as they otherwise could be.
With all your data in one place in a data fabric, businesses are finding that analytics and other similar tools are becoming supercharged.
● Improves Scalability
Every big business needs to be able to scale. This is particularly due to the sheer amount of data we are generating every year, and the fact that we store all that data. In short, your data needs to grow every year, so you need a system that works with your growth. A data fabric does just this, making it easier to grow without the pain.