As Halloween fast approaches, many people are still scrambling for that last-minute costume. As in years past, Halloween night will be filled with witch hats, clown faces, princess tiaras and cat ears. Given the continual rise in pop-culture films, Wonder WomanTM has made her way to the top costumes for 2020 list. But no matter how good your costume is, simply donning the gold headband, red cape, and “bulletproof” bangles probably won’t suddenly give you power to fight off crime.
The same principle is true in the data world. Simply labeling something a comprehensive data solution doesn’t make it so. Nor does compiling a collection of data management tools that happen to plug in together make a real Data Fabric. While they may look good from a distance, when you look up close and in-detail you will see they start to unravel.
What is a Data Fabric?
A real Data Fabric is a future-proof solution to streamlining your data and giving you what you need to produce real business value across departments in as few as a handful of weeks. Yes, really.
Think of your data like material -- a fabric, a woven piece of cloth with so many possibilities. You may have this beautiful cloth, but until it's shaped, it will never amount to anything more than a pile of data sitting in your closet.
What you need is a suit or a nice shirt, something you can actually use, and data is similar. It's meaningless until you take that data and shape it into a real question with measurable and valuable insights for moving your business forward, sideways, or in a different direction entirely.
When you take your fabric and make it into a shirt, is it a different material than the original roll? No. It's just shaped into something useful. When your IT department takes data and runs it through an algorithm designed to suss out details about customer behavior that previously went unnoticed, that's useful.
Now, suppose this material is elaborate and quite expensive. You don't just let anyone snip off the fabric until it's gone. You won't be able to make that material again without a master sample. But your teams need that fabric to create new clothing and accessories and learn how to work with such a tricky fabric.
Data Fabric is Your Raw Material
Data Fabric creates a way to tie together all your disparate data sources and provide access to everyone who needs insights while also keeping governance and security at the front of the line. It's not just data virtualization. It's the fabric itself.
Data Fabric:
- Delivers an integrated, trusted, and real-time view of business data
- Enables data sharing and collaboration among business users and partners
- Democratizes data
- Delivers comprehensive end-to-end data management capabilities
- Modernizes legacy technologies (no rip-and-replace required)
Data Fabric brings meaning to your data. It provides a de-siloed version of your data so that it can bring the value you were looking for. With the right Data Fabric, you have the lineage of your data as well, allowing you to understand its context.
What Data Fabric Isn’t (And Why You Should Care)
"We already have all these tools (ingestion, mastering, analytics…). Do we have a fabric?"
The short answer is no, but you knew that. Just because a system of different tools does most of what a Data Fabric can, it doesn't mean you have a Data Fabric.
The problem with this approach is that you think you're set with governance or ingestion, but what you have is numerous tools patched together. Each one requires a separate monitoring system that eventually becomes part of your dreaded "legacy" problem.
Because these tools aren't one unified option, they require more and more intervention as they age. One day, you'll look up and have another tool you must maintain because it's now a potential liability.
Just to be Clear, Data Fabric is Not:
- A collection of different tools that "do" what a unified Data Fabric does
- Data virtualization
- Simply a block of infrastructure
- An "IT-only" solution
The Modern Data Company is Your Modern Data Fabric Solution
Modern delivers a fully connected enterprise data network/fabric that reacts to changing business needs in real-time allowing you to innovate on your business models without worrying about technology.
- Real-Time: A real-time data platform that handles data in ALL formats
- Collaboration: Collaborate on data the way you collaborate with Google docs, Asana, Jira, etc.
- Empathy-Driven Architecture: Enables you to address people issues with flexible tech
- TTROI® (Time to ROI): ROI-driven approach to delivering value for our customers (weeks vs months/years)
Find out more about how DataOS enables cutting edge data solutions like data fabrics by downloading our white paper, “DataOS® – Data Evolution and Modern Data Management.”
