Data Fabric is a modern data architecture that helps companies efficiently manage complex data landscapes – across cloud, on-premise, and system boundaries.
What is Data Fabric?
An increasingly data-driven business world is increasing the pressure on companies to manage their data efficiently, securely, and flexibly. The data fabric architecture stands out as a pioneering approach to making data management, data integration, and governance fit for the future.
Why is Data Fabric important for companies?
Data Fabric offers a solution for managing today’s data landscapes: many different and complex data sources that only offer added value for decisions when combined in a meaningful way. The data fabric architecture makes data from different sources, both on-premise and cloud, available in real time and provides it contextually as so-called data products. The focus is not only on access, but above all on intelligent and automated data management. Through metadata management and DataOps concepts, it enables dynamic data orchestration across system boundaries.
How does Data Fabric work?
The “old world” in comparison is based on frequently replicated data in a business warehouse and on key figure calculations and logics in the frontend. Further challenges in classic business warehouses are the unclear distribution, versioning, and old data compatibility.
The new world of a data fabric provides a remedy through the “fabric layers”:
- In a raw data layer, the data is centrally replicated,
- in a semantic layer, the data is enriched (for example, for clear versioning, data governance, and compliance), and
- in a harmonization layer, they are merged. The harmonization layer forms the unified layer of data from various systems in the company, which is also of great relevance for the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
- Via the consumption layer of the data fabric, specialist departments can then specifically access the data intended for them.
The modular fabric layers then ensure that the data construct remains expandable and does not have to be constantly reset.
Data fabric architecture
What advantages does Data Fabric offer?
The implementation of a data fabric is not an isolated IT project, but a strategic driver for digital transformation. Companies benefit in the long term from the sensible management of complex system and data landscapes and increased data availability in multi-cloud environments. Furthermore, metadata management sets up a central and uniform guideline for data governance, which allows accesses and rights to be controlled. The data fabric also accelerates the development of new BI applications and services in order to provide the right people with robust and decision-supporting data at the right time.
In interaction with business intelligence systems such as PowerBI or SAP Analytics Cloud, there is added value: users not only have access to current data, but also to their context, which plays a decisive role for well-founded decisions. In the context of an S/4HANA conversion, for example, a solid architecture for corporate planning can be set up, which links data from the old world with data from the new system in order to continue to be able to access historical data.
Is Data Fabric the future of data management?
The data fabric architecture is an important step in making data-driven business decisions. The architecture supports agile, scalable, and secure processing of large amounts of data and is therefore the key to a resilient corporate data strategy.
Data Fabric triggers a rethink in data management: away from rigid pipelines, towards an intelligent, flexible web (fabric) of data, metadata, and processes. Anyone who wants to build and improve their BI strategy sustainably can gain an advantage through this architecture.
We support you in building a resilient data basis – for well-founded, key figure-based decisions with the help of your BI frontend today and the effective use of AI-supported agents tomorrow.
Let us walk the path through the data jungle together and shape a data-driven, agile future.
