Three Signs You Might Need a Data Fabric
A data fabric can help you access all your data and reach actionable insights. Here are three indicators that a data fabric may benefit your enterprise.
- By Kaycee Lai
- July 12, 2024
Organizations increasingly recognize the value of their data assets and that their ability to quickly and efficiently reach actionable insights is a key competitive differentiator. A data fabric can be a major factor in a modern data architecture to enable this.
At its core, a data fabric integrates data sources, whether on premises or in the cloud, and provides real-time connectivity for continuous analytics. This integration allows for the most current and accurate view of both technical and inferred metadata assets, enabling the creation and deployment of reusable data products.
Before determining if a data fabric is right for your organization, explore the benefits it offers your enterprise, examine how it complements other technologies, and be prepared for the new approach to data processing and distribution it may require. In this article we’ll explain three signs that indicate a data fabric may benefit your current environment.
Sign #1: You suffer from data silos and data fragmentation
One of the most significant challenges organizations face is data silos and fragmentation. As businesses grow and adopt new technologies, they often accumulate disparate data sources across different departments and platforms. These silos make it tougher to have a holistic view of your organization's data, resulting in inefficiencies and missed opportunities. You may have data silos if:
- Data reporting is inconsistent: Different departments report conflicting data metrics due to isolated data sources.
- Data integration requires manual efforts: Teams spend a considerable amount of time to manually integrate data from various sources.
- Decision making is delayed: An inability to access data in real time slows down your organization.
A data fabric addresses these issues by providing a unified view of all data sources, allowing for seamless data integration and real-time access. This logical data access reduces the need for manual data consolidation, enabling faster and more accurate reporting and better-informed decisions.
Sign #2: You need real-time analytics
You understand that real-time analytics is crucial to your organization’s success. You need to respond quickly to changing market conditions, customer behavior, and operational events. Traditional data integration methods, which often rely on batch processing, can be too slow to meet these demands. You need real-time analytics to:
- Manage the customer experience. If enhancing a customer’s experience through personalized and timely interactions is a priority, real-time analytics is essential.
- Operate efficiently. Real-time monitoring and analytics can help optimize operations, reduce downtime, and improve overall efficiency.
- Handle competitive pressure. Staying ahead of competitors requires quick adaptation to market trends and consumer demands, which is facilitated by real-time insights.
A data fabric enables real-time connectivity to data sources, providing up-to-date information for immediate and continuous analytics so you can act on insights as they emerge and maintain a competitive edge. This virtual data integration capability allows for real time access to all data without the need to move the data.
Sign #3: You need self-service data access
Modern data-driven organizations empower their employees with self-service data access so they can explore data and generate insights without relying heavily on IT or data engineering teams. However, achieving true self-service can be challenging without the right infrastructure. You need self-service access if your enterprise suffers from:
- Data request bottlenecks. If your data team is overwhelmed with requests from business users, you need self-service capabilities.
- Slow data preparation. Business users experiencing delays in accessing and preparing data for analysis can benefit from self-service tools.
- Innovation stagnation. Limited access to data can stifle innovation and hinder users’ ability to explore new business opportunities.
A data fabric supports governed self-service by providing a consistent, secure, and real-time view of your organization’s data assets. This is then coupled with automation technologies such as generative AI to empower more users to build their own data products and deliverables. The natural language (NLP) aspect of a generative AI approach enables both technical and non-technical users to not only access but consume data in an easy, real time, and self-service manner. This approach ensures that your business users can access the data they need when they need it without compromising data governance or security.
Complementing Existing Technologies
One of the key advantages of a data fabric is its ability to integrate with and enhance existing data processing and analytics technologies. Rather than replacing current investments, a data fabric works alongside them, providing virtual access to disparate data landscapes without requiring data movement. A data fabric can integrate with existing technologies such as:
- Data virtualization or virtual data integration, which a data fabric leverages to provide a unified view of data across different sources without physical consolidation
- Logical data access and metadata management to ensure logical data consistency and availability across various platforms
- Real-time data streaming capabilities enable continuous data flow and immediate analysis
By augmenting existing technologies, a data fabric can help your organization maximize its current investments while enhancing your overall data strategy.
Embracing a New Approach
Adopting a data fabric requires your organization to rethink its approach to data processing and distribution. This shift involves embracing a more integrated and real-time-centric model, which can provide significant benefits in terms of agility, efficiency, and insight generation.
Ultimately, a data fabric offers a powerful solution for organizations struggling with data silos, needing real-time analytics, or seeking to empower their business users with self-service data access. By providing a unified, real-time view of data across disparate sources, a data fabric can enhance your organization’s ability to generate timely and actionable insights.
Yet with any technology adoption, it requires consideration and a willingness to embrace new approaches. As data fabrics become more readily available to buy (rather than having to build them with expensive integration projects from scratch), the potential benefits make it a compelling option for any organization wanting to be more data-driven.