Data Fabric: An Emerging Trend in Data Management Tool for Digital Transformation

Big data and its management have only grown in compounding terms as far as data integrity and data preservation is concerned. This highlights the power that vests with data as information curation, organization and dissemination is critical to business focused solutions and strategies. Any entity needs to develop expertise in order to capitalize and leverage the meaning that any unit of data can drive. New-age entities are at the forefront when it comes to data management and driving business decisions through the inferences being drawn upon by them. Data Fabric Architecture is believed to be a sub-system of the contemporary data management mechanisms worked through multiple stages pertaining to big data and data management models which inherently translates into a robust Data Fabric Architecture. When converged and brought together across multiple different levels capturing a variety of data components arising out of advanced and emerging technologies can most certainly aid the large businesses and entities to efficiently and effectively manage the length and breadth of their data.

It becomes imperative to understand what Data Fabric Architecture is and how it can be a fundamental instrument in generating meaningful data insight and ultimately help in a more productive decision-making process. The huge influx of information and complex data often highlights the issue of data management and data assembly (traditionally data storage). Resolving this, many attempts of creating a solid and an embedded network of systems and subsystems have been made in order to curate and collate complicated data sets into a more organized and meaningful knowledge. It has been successful, however many such issues pertaining to security and privacy concerns have surfaced over time. Primarily, one such part of the economy that heavily deals with huge piles of data consistently are large corporations, financial institutions, banks, policy think tanks, and many such other entities.

The integrated network propelled by people and driven by automated systems has influenced the way information travels and how it is comprehended and utilized. Enterprises have been overwhelmed by the inundation of data, in a hyper-connected business world which transits into a concrete way of data integration, in which the Data Fabric Architecture can help build a more resilient and robust data management system which shall be modern and customized. The principles of Data Fabric intrinsically center around assessment, identification, communication and measurement. Businesses across the world have been seeking to become more of a data-driven and a data analytics oriented in their decision-making protocols and procedures to be able to extract as much of potential value as possible from the available set of data bound together through multiple data sources and even scattered data environments.

However, with the rise of severe data-oriented technologies and database interfaces, data devices and models and storage environments (tangible forms, cloud or even multi-cloud), data management activities have become inevitably tougher than previous decades of database management facilitated in a comprehensively traditional way.  And, with changing times, one resolution to deal with data storage and data accessibility is to institute a one hyperlinked and deeply embedded system or sub-systems governed by a dense network if interactions enabled via a Data Fabric Architecture that shall allow organizations to track and gain as scientific cognizance of the involuted business issues. A data ecosystem is defined as a set network consisting of autonomous entities that either directly or indirectly consume, create or distribute data and other relevant resources. Actors engage in one or more distinct “roles,” each of which has a set of responsibilities, and they interact with other actors through connections that benefit the entire data ecosystem by encouraging self-regulation. Big Data’s environment of data from various sources will continue to be a problem for users, data producers, and developers for a very long time. The production, harmonization, and utilization of data from numerous sources require extensive research.

The short-term and myopic sustainable competitive advantage of R&D (Knowledge transfers) or financial investments for enterprise Data Fabric systems and subsystems are precisely associated with the business environment and the set of combinations of IT systems targeted towards transitioning into the long-term the conceived sustainable competitive advantage shall contract and shrink. The advancing technological constituents like the Big Data Analytics or Multi-level Cloud Computing are considered to be the building-blocks of the emerging and novel configurations of Date Fabric Enterprise Architecture. DFA highlights the importance of a balance being maintained in the design of the architecture as far as system complexity and simplicity is concerned. It has to be sophisticated and not strenuously involuted.Data or any given set of information will always remain a powerful tool of decision-making and strategizing at the disposal of the top management of any enterprise or organization. Data can be exponentially voluminous or tediously scalable. The field of Big Data and Data Fabric for that matter needs a fundamental acceptance since data is not static and companies need to achieve insights. It is crucial procedure to follow whilst to begin to integrate processes when assigning and assembling the constituents of Data Fabric.

Organizations in emerging economies require a better approach that delivers greater insights and business outcomes faster, without compromising data access restrictions, in order to streamline data access and empower users to exploit trusted information. There are numerous strategies, but you want a flexible architecture that can be applied regardless of your data estate. An architectural strategy called a “data fabric” helps businesses to streamline data access and governance across a hybrid multi-cloud environment for improved 360-degree perspectives. With this strategy, enterprises are not required to totally decentralize their operations or shift all of their data to a single location or data storage. An architecture for a data fabric, on the other hand, suggests striking a balance between what must be logically or physically centralized and what must be decentralized. In an environment that is becoming more diverse, remote, and complicated, data management agility has emerged as a mission-critical concern for enterprises. Data and analytics (D&A) professionals need to look beyond conventional data management approaches and move toward contemporary solutions like AI-enabled data integration in order to decrease human errors and total costs. Increasing demand for real-time and event-driven data sharing, high cost and low value data integration cycles, frequent maintenance of earlier integrations, and other issues can all be addressed by the developing architectural idea known as “data fabric.”

In order to access existing data or promote its consolidation, when necessary, data fabric makes use of both human and machine capabilities. It continuously recognizes and links data from many applications to find distinctive, commercially significant relationships among the data points available. When compared to conventional data management techniques, the insight promotes reengineered decision-making and offers additional value through quick access and comprehension. Data fabric is a design idea that shifts the emphasis of machine and human tasks rather than merely combining traditional and modern technology. The data fabric design can only be realized with the aid of cutting-edge technology like embedded machine learning (ML), active metadata management, and semantic knowledge graphs. By automating routine processes like profiling datasets, finding and aligning schema to new data sources, and, at its most sophisticated, fixing failed data integration jobs, the architecture optimizes data management. There is currently no standalone solution that can enable a complete data fabric architecture. D&A leaders can guarantee a powerful data fabric architecture by combining built-in and purchased solutions.

A Data Fabric design can incorporate fundamental data management capabilities while being agnostic of data environments, data usage, data processes, and geography. This structure generates data that is prepared for artificial intelligence analysis and usage, automating the discovery and governance of data. By removing silos, the Data Fabric implementation can offer a single environment for accessing and gathering all data. When various technologies are not needed anymore, it also provides simplified data administration, including data integration, governance, and sharing. Because of this, the cloud is more scalable and can support on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud systems as well as massive volumes of data, their sources, and applications. This lessens reliance on outdated systems and procedures. The entire purpose behind having a Data Fabric Architecture is to warrant that data stored in complex hybrid structures across the data storage landscape can address the challenges pertaining to the evolving capabilities of the data environments such as multi-clod, multi-vendor, multi-layer cloud computing, and many such other dynamics. It clearly defines a large amount of investment to be done as a spart of the data infrastructure solution in any given organization. A good level of visibility is also ensured with end-to-end data analytics and management as data assets continue to grow and intensify.

Specifically, the Data Fabric is believed to be an improvement over the traditional and already existing data infrastructure frameworks and models, supported often by automation and other AI based models for the purposes of data-management processes. Its’ operation at a rudimentary and foundational level is depicted as an integrated layer; the fabric of the data and every associated and connecting series of processes. It then goes on to implementing analytics over the complex metadata assets implying that every data point provides more intrinsic and extrinsic information about other data points, which as per many other supplementing reports, supports the aspects of the Data Fabric – design, implementation, deployment and utilization of an integrated and re-consumable data across all the confederated environments, whether it may be a hybrid mode or a multi-cloud platforms with in-built analytics to be able to interpret and synthesize the metadata; Data Fabric Architecture can be a better data management, storage and analytics framework.

The goal of data fabrics is to address this issue. Modern data management strategies such as data fabrics are based on the premise that data proliferation and decentralization will increase, rendering obsolete the conventional strategy of managing data through centrally controlled repositories. Data fabrics, on the other hand, uphold federated governance and make use of AI to automatically and dynamically connect various data sources throughout an organization, index them, and make them accessible for usage with data analytics as needed. Data fabrics are flexible enough to connect new data sources as they emerge while integrating with existing architectures. Data fabrics enable self-service analytics when combined with a strong data analytics platform, enabling everyone to access data with AI-powered predictions, what-if scenario planning, guided model construction, insights, and techniques. Data Fabric can aid many organizations to accelerate their goal of business transformation through supporting parameters like Technology at speed, Innovation at scale and Humans at center. In a world of limited resources and continuous supply chain difficulties, firms must fulfil new imperatives for generating sustainable and resilient growth.

Sonika Jha
Sonika Jha
Research Scholar (Strategy) FORE School of Management, New Delhi, India