[Translate to Englisch:] Data Fabric: Zukunft des Datenmanagements

Data Fabric: Rethinking Your Data Strategy

Data Fabric: A Key Architecture for Modern Data Strategies

Data Fabric is a modern data architecture that helps companies efficiently manage complex data landscapes – across cloud, on-premises environments, and system boundaries.


What is Data Fabric?

In an increasingly data-driven business world, companies are under growing pressure to manage their data efficiently, securely, and with agility. The Data Fabric architecture stands out as a forward-looking approach to future-proofing data management, integration, and governance.


Why is Data Fabric Important for Businesses?

Data Fabric offers a solution for managing today’s fragmented and complex data landscapes. These diverse data sources only generate business value when brought together meaningfully. The Data Fabric architecture makes data from different sources – both on-prem and in the cloud – available in real time and delivers it as contextualized “data products.”
Beyond data access, the focus lies 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?

Traditional (“old world”) data management often relies on heavily replicated data in a business warehouse and performs key figure calculations and logic in the frontend. Legacy data warehouses also suffer from issues like unclear data distribution, versioning challenges, and lack of compatibility with historical data. 

The new world of Data Fabric resolves these challenges through its “fabric layers”:
 

  • In a raw data layer, data is centrally replicated.
     
  • In a semantic layer, data is enriched—for example, with clear versioning, data governance, and compliance elements.
     
  • In a harmonization layer, data is unified across systems. This layer is especially critical for enabling AI and machine learning use cases.
     
  • Finally, the consumption layer allows business units to access only the data relevant to them.

Thanks to these modular “fabric layers,” the data architecture remains extensible and does not need to be rebuilt repeatedly.

 

A Key Architecture for Modern Data Strategies: Data Fabric
Data Fabric Architecture


What Are the Benefits of Data Fabric?

Implementing a Data Fabric is not just an isolated IT project – it’s a strategic driver of digital transformation. Over the long term, businesses benefit from more effective management of complex system and data environments and increased data availability in multi-cloud scenarios.

Metadata management also enables the implementation of a centralized and unified data governance policy, allowing control over data access and permissions.

Data Fabric accelerates the development of new BI applications and services, making it possible to deliver meaningful, decision-supporting data to the right people at the right time.

When combined with business intelligence systems like Power BI or SAP Analytics Cloud, Data Fabric adds value: users gain access not only to current data but also to its context, which plays a key role in making sound business decisions.

In the context of an S/4HANA conversion, for instance, Data Fabric enables the creation of a solid architecture for business planning – linking legacy data with data from the new system and ensuring continued access to historical records.


Is Data Fabric the Future of Data Management?

The Data Fabric architecture is a major step toward enabling data-driven decision-making. It supports agile, scalable, and secure processing of large volumes of data, making it a key element of a resilient enterprise data strategy.

Data Fabric triggers a fundamental shift in data management: away from rigid pipelines and toward an intelligent, flexible fabric made of data, metadata, and processes. Companies looking to build or enhance a sustainable BI strategy can gain a clear advantage from this architecture.

We help you build a robust data foundation – empowering you to make sound, metric-driven decisions with your BI frontend today and to harness AI-powered agents effectively in the future.

Let’s navigate the data jungle together and shape a data-driven, agile future.

 

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