What is a Data Fabric?
How to realize modern Data Management
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A Data Fabric is an end-to-end data integration and management solution that lets you share data across your organization and lets you to go over and to manage data.
A Data Fabric is designed to help organizations solve complex data problems and use cases by managing their data regardless of the types of applications, platforms, and where the data is stored. Data Fabric enables seamless access and data sharing in a distributed data environment.
In the example below from IBM, you can see how the whole thing is meant. You have, for example, several layers in the area of data storage, these can of course also exist across platforms, these are in turn managed by a Data Hub. Read more about the Data Hub here. Finally, the services are the user experience, the sharing of data, the monitoring and protection, etc. which then make this construct a so-called data fabric.
Within the last years, technologies like artificial intelligence, the internet of things, 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 within the decision making [1].
Another good exmaple of a Data Farbic is Google Dataplex which enables you centralized security and governance and unify distributed data without data movement.
Enterprises have data distributed across Data Lakes, Data Warehouses, and Data Marts. Dataplex enables you to unify this data without any data movement, organize it based on your business needs, and centrally manage, monitor, and govern this data. Dataplex enables standardization and unification of metadata, security policies, governance, classification, and data lifecycle management across this distributed data. — Google [2]
Read more about Google Data Plex and how to implement a Data Fabric here.
So the idea is to integrate databases and forms such as Data Warehouses and Data Lakes better through Data Hubs and also Data Lakehouses and to be able to share data better. Data Fabrics go one step further and offer you services that facilitate control, monitoring, etc. for you and the company.
Sources and Furhter Readings
[1] IBM, Data Fabric (2022)
[2] Google, What is Dataplex? (2022)
