If your business has a sophisticated, modern relationship with its data, then you will be able to make faster decisions and better choices. Those improvements enable real-time insights, more collaboration between departments, and more reliable tools and software.
That modern approach to data — which is open, reliable, and silo-free — requires a modern Data Fabric.
What is a Data Fabric?
Data Fabric isn’t a specific tool, product, or software — it’s more of an approach. You probably already have a data fabric of some kind. You have data sources, pipelines, integrations, delivery methods, and applications. Together, they form a data fabric, but a more strategic, modernised and formalised Data Fabric is a strategic set of principles around data governance, delivery, architecture, and integration.
Those principles and tools typically involve:
- Data governance
- Data security and data access
- Data integration
- Data Engineering
- Data Lake and Data Warehouse
- AI, including machine learning and large language models
- Analytics, and data visualisations
Data Fabric ensures that data is accessible to people and systems, and ensures that the data remains accurate, trustworthy, and meaningful.
When it comes to that last point, meaningful data, that’s where metadata is fundamental to your Data Fabric. That context — the information about the data — is what gives the data its value. Data Fabric governs and preserves that metadata, so that the data you hold remains useful to the business.
What are the business benefits of modernising your data fabric?
Once you modernise your Data Fabric:
- your teams will feel empowered to use data
- your systems will have fuller, more realistic data sets to use
- you can rest assured that the information that your business is using is accurate
That has a series of positive impacts on your organisation.
Faster decisions with real-time insights
Accessible, comprehensive, reliable data means your systems can offer accurate reports and fuller depictions of market and business conditions. Your team will know that what they are seeing is accurate, and they don’t need to piece together a picture based on fragmented or partial data. You can then quickly and confidently respond with proposals and strategies.
When data silos are eliminated, there is also less scope for disagreement, or need for negotiation of data interpretation. When every team operates using the same data, there is no departmental version of the truth, there is only a Single Version of the Truth (SVT) shared by everyone.
Better decisions through richer data
Unified data also means your organisation makes better decisions. With the full picture, you don’t have to rely on guesswork or extrapolation. You can build strategies using an accurate, detailed, and trustworthy picture of the commercial landscape. Of course, strategies like that are far more likely to succeed, and deliver much greater returns.
More secure data
Access to data is broader with a Data Fabric in place, which means the approach involves more data governance safeguards. In short, the organisation’s data is more secure with a Data Fabric.
As well as preventing breaches from happening in the first place, a Data Fabric can prevent cyber attacks from being as serious as they might be. Some businesses choose to combine a Data Fabric with a cyber security mesh. Gartner reports that in 2024, organisations that do so will reduce the financial impact of security incidents by 90%.
Trustworthy AI
AI’s efficiency and speed mean faster processing and decisions, but if you feed it poor data, it means you’ll be making poorer choices more quickly. An AI or automation program will multiply inaccuracies by basing decisions on inaccurate information, which was in turn based on poor data. That is a vicious cycle that could be disastrous.
When data silos are eliminated all AI and Automation programs have access to full, accurate data, and their output is significantly more reliable.
How do we modernise our data fabric?
First, you need to take a step back to decide if the Data Fabric that you have is delivering the most relevant business benefits, and whether it will continue to do this in the coming years.
You then need to look at where that Fabric is patchy (or full of holes) in order to knit a robust and fully-functioning Fabric. By doing so, you can increase the business value of your data by making data-driven opportunities available across the business.
According to Gartner, if organisations want to modernise their data management solutions in line with Data Fabric principles, they need to:
- Take a portfolio-based approach to integration. Rather than approaching the integration of isolated pipelines, think about how it combines different sources to make data easier to access and deliver.
- Establish a technology base. Introducing data fabric doesn’t necessarily mean scrapping your technology stack and starting again from scratch: it’s about assessing how your tools are woven together and identifying the existing, overlapping or missing capabilities.
- Invest in your metadata catalogue. Metadata is a critical component of Data Fabric, and understanding the story behind the data will enable the business to better contribute to it.
At Agile Solutions, we’re helping organisations like yours to build a robust Data Fabric. Whether you choose to introduce a specially designed Data Fabric solution or integrate a ‘best of breed’ approach, we can support you through the process.
From assessing your existing data landscape and architecture to implementing and integrating technologies, we design a solution that delivers tangible business benefits that are tied to your organisational goals and bring technical excellence to your build.
Ready to explore the benefits of Data Fabric? Take a read of Data Fabric: Democratise your data to extract its full value, an Agile Solutions guide to introducing this flexible data architecture.
