Here’s why businesses love what Data Fabric does for them
Today’s world is a capitalist, frenzied and intense race to the finish line.
Every step is a competition, every obstacle is bigger than before, and every minor achievement is overshadowed by the breakneck speed needed to reach the finish line. Businesses and companies are some of the major players in this fierce race, with businesses clamoring for every single advantage that they can snag, to stay one step ahead of their counterparts.
Data is one of the most important assets businesses have, and companies can either make or break depending on how much value they can extract from the data they have. Businesses are under constant pressure from markets to monetize their data and have limited time, resources, and skilled labor to glean effective profits from this data.
Data is ever-expanding, due to growing businesses, mergers, acquisitions, and increasing consumers, and thus it becomes a challenge to carefully integrate data across various platforms, or even copy it safely before analytics, engineers, and scientists can do their job.
This is where data management platforms come into play. Data fabrics are some of the most advanced methods of data governance and management and have revolutionized the tech world.
What is Data Fabric?
A Data Fabric is essentially a type of ‘data management architecture; defined as a ‘group of servers and other hardware tools responsible for storing and processing data”. Different types of data are available across different platforms and are stored in different places. Data fabrics help ensure that data available in one location can easily move to another, and thus several applications can use data from the same location or resource.
Moreover, it effectively integrates data, organizes it comprehensively, and applies artificial intelligence or other analytic tools to the data, thus effectively extracting maximum market value from this data.
Several technology companies have started producing and selling data fabric products, effectively providing a data fabric solution to every data management problem growing businesses are facing. Data fabric is revolutionizing the integration of data all over the world.
What are Data Silos?
Data that is trapped and isolated, thus rendering it rather useless and inaccessible, is known as ‘Siloed Data’. Data can become so, for many reasons, such as data that is taken up from different sources. This makes the different data incompatible, difficult to integrate and analyze. Data can also be siloed if it is stored in different locations. Data silos have become a serious and emerging problem for many businesses. This is where data fabrics thus play an essential role in helping these businesses.
How does Data Fabric help businesses?
Data fabrics have now become integral to the functioning of businesses in several ways:
- Speed: Companies and businesses today are ever-enlarging, with databases that are growing exponentially. It takes a massive amount of time, resources, and manpower to sort through this data, organize it, integrate it. When queries are made in a database containing billions and billions of records, it takes days and days for results to return. Data fabrics streamline this process. With data engineering, what this architecture does is, that it applies machine learning to sort through data of larger sets, whenever a query is made, and this entire process is used to create accelerated pathways. This helps businesses bypass extraneous data, and streamline processes by 5-100 times the speed. This is crucial for businesses dependent on the results of data, such as to make profits and valuable decisions, in a fast-growing, competitive capitalist world.
- Data Governance: Data fabrics are crucial to IT systems of booming businesses, simply because it helps in data governance. Data governance can be defined as arranging and organizing data across different resources, environments, applications, and users. For example, if an object has moved to another application, data fabrics help in moving the data appropriately and notifying all the components of the object. Data governance identifies, connects, and quickly analyzes technical, scientific, and business data across different platforms, providing quick and accurate intel for business decisions.
- Break down Data Silos: Databases in most businesses are connected to applications. As more applications are added, the number of databases keeps on growing. The date base of one application is very different from another and difficult to integrate, with completely different information. Data fabrics help integrate the different databases, making data from one application accessible to all applications. This streamlines the information, by filtering out irrelevant data.
- Unites databases: Databases may have a multitude of different locations. However, data fabrics ensure that data restriction does not occur due to location barriers, and makes the data easily accessible across several platforms.
In conclusion, businesses are better off with data fabrics, as it helps them effectively monetize their data, quickly and easily, with lesser resources and manpower. Companies are now moving forward with the idea of data fabrics, and with the technological industry coming up with even more advanced data fabrics, this product will remain in relevance for a long time.