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What is a data fabric?

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 What is a data fabric?

Data fabric architecture

Advantages of data fabric architectures

Use cases of data fabrics

Related solutions

Resources

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What is a data fabric?

Data fabric is an architecture that facilitates the end-to-end
integration of various data pipelines and cloud environments through
the use of intelligent and automated systems.

Over the last decade, developments within hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, the
internet of things (IoT), and edge computing have led to the exponential growth of big
data, creating even more complexity for enterprises to manage. This has made the
unification and governance of data environments an increasing priority as this growth
has created significant challenges, such as data silos, security risks, and general
bottlenecks to decision making.

Data management teams are addressing these challenges head on with data fabric
solutions. They are leveraging them to unify their disparate data systems, embed
governance, strengthen security and privacy measures, and provide more data
accessibility to workers, particularly their business users.

These data integration efforts via data fabrics allow for more holistic, data-centric
decision-making. Historically, an enterprise may have had different data platforms
aligned to specific lines of business. For example, you might have a HR data platform,
a supply chain data platform, and a customer data platform, which house data in
different and separate environments despite potential overlaps. However, a data
fabric can allow decision-makers to view this data more cohesively to better
understand the customer lifecycle, making connections between data that didn’t exist
before.

By closing these gaps in understanding of customers, products and processes, data

fabrics are accelerating digital transformation and automation initiatives across
businesses.

Data fabric versus data virtualization

Data virtualization is one of the technologies that enables a data fabric approach.
Rather than physically moving the data from various on-premises and cloud sources
using the standard ETL (extract, transform, load) processes, a data virtualization tool
connects to the different sources, integrating only the metadata required and creating
a virtual data layer. This allows users to leverage the source data in real-time.

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Data fabric architecture
By leveraging data services and APIs, data fabrics pull together data from legacy
systems, data lakes, data warehouses, sql databases, and apps, providing a holistic
view into business performance. In contrast to these individual data storage systems,
it aims to create more fluidity across data environments, attempting to counteract the
problem of data gravity—i.e. the idea that data becomes more difficult to move as it
grows in size. A data fabric abstracts away the technological complexities engaged for
data movement, transformation and integration, making all data available across the
enterprise.

Data fabric architectures operate around the idea of loosely coupling data in platforms
with applications that need it. One example of data fabric architecture in a multi-cloud
environment may look like the below, where one cloud, like AWS, manages data
ingestion and another platform, such as Azure, oversees data transformation and
consumption. Then, you might have a third vendor, like IBM Cloud Pak® for Data,
providing analytical services. The data fabric architecture stitches these environments
together to create a unified view of data.

That said, this is just one example. There isn’t one single data architecture for a data
fabric as different businesses have different needs. The various number of cloud
providers and data infrastructure implementations ensure variation across
businesses. However, businesses utilizing this type of data framework exhibit
commonalities across their architectures, which are unique to a data fabric. More
specifically, they have six fundamental components, which Forrester (link resides
outside ibm.com) describes in the “Enterprise Data Fabric Enables DataOps” report.
These six layers include the following:

1. Data Management layer: This is responsible for data governance and security of
data.
2. Data Ingestion Layer: This layer begins to stitch cloud data together, finding
connections between structured and unstructured data.
3. Data Processing: The data processing layer refines the data to ensure that only
relevant data is surfaced for data extraction.
4. Data Orchestration: This critical layer conducts some of the most important jobs
for the data fabric—transforming, integrating, and cleansing the data, making it
usable for teams across the business.
5. Data Discovery: This layer surfaces new opportunities to integrate disparate data
sources. For example, it might find ways to connect data in a supply chain data
 mart and customer relationship management data system, enabling new
opportunities for product offers to clients or ways to improve customer
satisfaction.
6. Data Access: This layer allows for the consumption of data, ensuring the right
permissions for certain teams to comply with government regulations. Additionally,
this layer helps surface relevant data through the use of dashboards and other
data visualization tools.

Advantages of data fabric architectures

As data fabric providers gain more adoption from businesses in the market, Gartner
(link resides outside ibm.com) has noted specific improvements in efficiency, touting
that it can reduce “time for integration design by 30%, deployment by 30%, and
maintenance by 70%.” While it’s clear that data fabrics can improve overall
productivity, the following benefits have also demonstrated business value for
adopters:

– Intelligent integration: Data fabrics utilize semantic knowledge graphs, metadata

management, and machine learning to unify data across various data types and
endpoints. This aids data management teams in clustering related datasets
together as well as integrating net new data sources into a business’s data
 ecosystem. This functionality automates aspects of data workload management,
leading to the aforementioned efficiency gains, but it also helps to eliminate silos
across data systems, centralize data governance practices, and improve overall
data quality.
– Democratization of data: Data fabric architectures facilitates self-service
applications, broadening the access of data beyond more technical resources, such
as data engineers, developers, and data analytics teams. The reduction of data
bottlenecks subsequently fosters more productivity, enabling business users to
make faster business decisions and by freeing up technical users to prioritize tasks
that better utilize their skillsets.
– Better data protection: The broadening of data access also doesn’t mean
compromising on data security and privacy measures. In fact, it means that more
data governance guardrails are put into place around access controls, ensuring
specific data is only available to certain roles. Data fabric architectures also allow
technical and security teams to implement data masking and encryption around
sensitive and proprietary data, mitigating risks around data sharing and system
breaches.

Use cases of data fabrics

Data fabrics are still in their infancy in terms of adoption, but their data integration
capabilities aid businesses in data discovery, allowing them to take on a variety of use
cases. While the use cases that a data fabric can handle may not be extremely
different from other data products, it differentiates itself by the scope and scale that it
can handle as it eliminates data silos. By integrating across various data sources,
companies and their data scientists can create a holistic view of their customers,
which has been particularly helpful with banking clients. Data fabrics have been more
specifically used for:

– Customer profiles.
– Fraud detection.
– Preventative maintenance analysis.
– Return-to-work risk models, and more.
Related solutions

IBM Cloud Pak for Data

IBM Cloud Pak for Data is an open, extensible data platform that provides a data fabric to
make all data available for AI and analytics, on any cloud.

Explore IBM Cloud Pak for Data

IBM Watson® Studio

Build, run and manage AI models. Prepare data and build models on any cloud using
open source code or visual modeling. Predict and optimize your outcomes.

Explore IBM Watson Studio

IBM® Db2® on Cloud

Learn about Db2 on Cloud, a fully managed SQL cloud database configured and optimized
for robust performance.

Explore IBM Db2 on Cloud

Resources
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