Making good decisions resides on accessing and sharing the right data at the right time

October 24, 2022

Making good decisions resides on accessing and sharing the right data at the right time. To do so, consider integrating a Data Fabric!

In the past decade we have seen a change in information architecture, there are more of data lakes and less of data warehousing, but even in the data lakes there is still alot of data in silos, not only in onsite premises but also across the cloud infrastructure. To ensure that your data can be accessed and used for decision making, you need to have a better and enhanced information architecture. A Data Fabric architecture allows you to access and share your data across all the sources in your organization.

Many organization across the globe and from different industries struggle with data accessibility and data quality issues. This problems can be solved by adopting an holistic data approach that supports their decision making to remain competitive and efficient.

According to data specialists the most common pains points when dealing with data are:

Time spent on preparing data
Inaccurate data
Decreased data quality
Increased data storage costs
Increased compliance requirements
Biased analysis

What is Data Fabric?

Data fabric is an architecture that facilitates the end-to-end integration of various data pipelines and cloud environments by using intelligent and automated data management capabilities. It is a powerful architecture that standardizes data management practices across the organization. It allows users to monitor and manage their data and applications 24x7x365, regardless of where they reside.

A Data Fabric architecture integrates data, but also can detect what data is being used and where — and then make recommendations for more, different and better data. This simplifies management effort and captures the value of data faster. A Data Fabric architecture is agnostic to any data environment, data processes, data use and geography or integrating core data management capabilities.

Main Benefits:

For organizations that want to maximize their business value from enterprise data spread across a distributed landscape, a Data Fabric architecture is the solution. It offers the following benefits:

Intelligent integration
Unified governance and better data protection
Knowledge insights
Better decision making
Democratization of data

Top Capabilities:

Revealing the value of data remains a huge challenge for some companies. The key to success is the ability to turn data into a strategic and manageable asset by adopting a Data Fabric strategy to eliminate complexity, errors and miss on relevant opportunities.

A Data Fabric strategy delivers a manageable, predictable, and resilient platform with AI and automation built in that makes your data work for you.

The top capabilities of a Data Fabric are:

1. Self-Service access to the data: it is a marketplace to find, collaborate, get access to data (this could also include a feature store, or popular queries, etc.) and ability to query data anywhere. Business users need to have self-service access to quality data so that they can make the most out of it, having the minimum support from IT.

2. Intelligent Catalog: which is infused with machine learning and AI to get a good data quality, metadata across your organization, an also to be able to search for relevant assets required for your analysis.

3. Intelligent and effective Data Pipeline: in order to avoid moving data unnecessarily you need to have an effective pipeline to access your data. With a range of integration styles to extract, ingest, stream, virtualize, and transform data, driven by data policies to maximize performance while minimizing storage and egress costs, and ability to train models without copying data (e.g., vertical federated learning).

4. Security and Policies: unified definition and enforcement of data policies tied to the other layers (i.e., associate policies with data, control access, etc.), data governance, data quality and data stewardship.

5. Unified lifecycle: end-to-end lifecycle to compose, build, test, deploy, and manage the various aspects of the data fabric (e.g., compose, deploy, and manage a data pipeline).

In conclusion, a Data Fabric helps organizations to make use of their data in the most effective way in order to make decisions based on facts and up-to-date information. It represents a competitive advantage for the organization!

Necando offers you the best advice and resources for better data management and the implementation of a Data Fabric solution supported by the modern technology of IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Whether you need strategic or tactical coaching, training or technical assistance, we’re here to help.

According to a study published by Gartner, Data Fabric solutions are increasingly being adopted by organizations because the efficiency benefits they offer are considerable: “30% integration design time, 30% deployment time and 70% maintenance time.” 1

About Necando Solutions

Necando helps North American organizations optimize their most valuable corporate assets – people and data. We have worked with government agencies, financing, transportation, etc. Our rich and diversified experience and understanding combined with the IBM data solutions portfolio are what we are proud to provide to our clients.

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