In the recent times, it is seen that business leaders are facing market pressure to extract value from their data pipelines within the constraints of limited budgets, time and skills. Data is so diverse and massive that it poses constant management challenges to business operators. Data Fabric comes as a distributed data management platform where the sole objective is to combine various types of data storage, access, preparation, analytics and security tools in a fully compliant manner. It makes the task of Data Management easy and smooth. With the rising business need to analyse real time and historical data collectively, a data fabric provides the ideal Data Management infrastructure for speedy decisions. The Data Fabric market size was valued at $812.6 million in 2018 and is projected to reach $4,546.9 million by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 23.8 per cent from 2019 to 2026.

Ensures Consistency across Integrated Environments

“Whenever very high volume of data or diverse types are integrated and analysed together, Data Fabric is used as it offers hope to businesses that have been struggling with Big Data Management for years”, says Gerrit Kazmaier, Vice President, Google Cloud. When the primary operation data lake fails for some reason, a backup data lake can take over for recovery, replication, or substitute operational purposes. Gone are the days of disparate, disconnected infrastructures and data siloes the size of skyscrapers. A Data Fabric is built upon a rich set of data management capabilities that ensure consistency across integrated environments. It also reduces tedious management through automation, speeds up dev/test and deployment, and protects the assets round the clock.

Pervasive Data Quality

Data Fabric has integrated data quality into each step of data management be it discovering and ingesting data, using data stewardship and setting out roles for data cleansing, or need to trace data linage to ensure compliance and integrity. In simple words, Data Fabric is designed for IT Industry and businesses to collaborate and share healthy data with self-service data management. Data Fabric offers the breadth of capabilities needed by modern data driven organisations in a unified environment with a native architecture that enables them to adapt to changes faster with embedded data integrity. It makes it possible to deliver healthy, clean, complete and uncompromised data.

Works on Cloud and On-Premise Environment

Data Fabric can work on both cloud and on-premise environments in day to day life. Users can run to ingest and integrate data from both on-premises back office environments such as Oracle and SAP, cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Snowflake. Data Fabric quickly embraces new cloud based technologies, such as containers with Docker and Kubernetes, advanced analytics with Databricks, Qubole, Spark and serverless computing.

Industry experts believe that Data Fabric should be compatible with various data delivery styles including streaming, replication, messaging and data virtualization or data micro-services. In a growing world of connected devices, a Data Fabric can play a huge role in facilitating AI driven technologies and make a big impact on businesses. Interconnected data needs to be reliable and that reliability can be promised by the layered architecture of data fabric.

Provides Security

This unified platform enables the user to monitor storage costs, performance and efficiency. Once the user gains actionable insight into hybrid cloud environment, he can rapidly make changes to it including remediating problems, addressing security and compliance risks as well as dialling up and down compute. When the user is optimizing to save big bucks on storage, his data is protected by the highest levels of encryption.

Security is not an afterthought, its an innate attribute of a data fabric with the advanced backup and restore capabilities. It ultimately helps the organisations in unleashing the power of data to meet business demands and gain a competitive edge. It allows the IT Industry to better harness the power of hybrid cloud, build a hybrid multi-cloud experience, and modernize storage through data management.

Converts Passive Metadata to Active Metadata

It is important for organisations to activate metadata for frictionless sharing of data. For this to happen, Data Fabric should continuously analyse available metadata for key metrics and statistics and then build a graph model. It should graphically depict metadata in an easy to understand manner, based on their unique and business relevant relationships. Data Fabric also leverages key metadata metrics to enable Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning algorithms that learn over time and churn out advanced predictions regarding data management and integration.

The Way Forward

There have been many approaches used for years in data management and analytics. Data Fabric’s design and core principles will resolve the majority of the current and most serious problems of data management. The entire ecosystem will incorporate new resources and enable them to cooperate with others by its very design. This would help with most of the analytics solutions, scalability and the integration of new data types.