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What is a Data Fabric?

Unlock the Full Potential of Your Data Today

Elevate your data strategy with a data fabric to enable AI and gain a competitive edge in the digital landscape!

The Benefits of Integrating a Data Fabric into Your Business

Scalable, Efficient Data Infrastructure

Instant, Real-time Data Access

Build a scalable, flexible infrastructure that unifies data across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured sources. Seamlessly integrate with diverse environments, reducing the complexity of managing distributed data.

Access and analyze all your data in real time—whether from data lakes, data warehouses, or SaaS apps—without moving or duplicating it by using data virtualization. Speed up decision-making by eliminating the need for time-consuming ETL processes.

Enterprise-Grade Data Governance and Security

Enhance your data governance and security with robust, centralized controls. Apply enterprise-grade access policies, track data lineage, and ensure data quality while maintaining compliance with regulations.

Self-Service Analytics and AI

Future-Proof Your Data Strategy

Providing seamless connectivity using data virtualization
An augmented data catalog helps with data discovery and enables to break down data silos.

Empower teams with self-service analytics and AI tools. With the help of AI, even non-technical users can tap into the insights hidden in big data, helping your organization unlock its full potential.

Implement a data fabric architecture that evolves with your business. Seamlessly integrate new and existing data sources to ensure consistent performance and reliability, while managing data across all environments.

Why Choose Best in Class for Your Data Fabric Needs?

A best-in-class data fabric solution ensures your organization can scale efficiently, unify data from multiple sources, and provide real-time access. With features like advanced metadata management, robust governance, and AI-driven insights, you can confidently rely on your data while maintaining strict security standards. The right solution future-proofs your data strategy, allowing it to grow and adapt alongside your business.
Want to hear real life data fabric uses cases from industry leaders? Check out our podcast "The Data Fabric Show."

What Exactly is a Data Fabric?

A data fabric is a modern, unified architecture that connects and integrates data across your organization, no matter where that data resides. It can handle structured data, such as databases; semi-structured data, like JSON or XML files; and unstructured data, such as documents, emails, or multimedia content. This versatile approach allows for seamless data integration from on-premises systems, cloud platforms, or even hybrid environments. A data fabric leverages advanced metadata management, automation, and AI to ensure that all data is discoverable, accessible, and governable in real time, which is key to unlocking its full potential.

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By implementing a data fabric, organizations can effectively break down data silos, improve data quality, and simplify access to vast amounts of big data. This provides a solid foundation for faster, more informed decision-making, empowering teams across the enterprise to make smarter business decisions.

A data fabric combines various capabilities: an augmented data catalog, a knowledge graph enriched with semantics, active metadata, an recommendation engine, data preparation and data delivery capabilities, data and AI orchestration, and data integration capabilities. Put together, these capabilities make it possible to seamlessly discover, access, and integration data from heterogeneous sources.

Augmented Data Catalog

An augmented data catalog automatically organizes, classifies, and enriches metadata across the enterprise, providing a comprehensive overview of all your data assets. By leveraging AI-powered search and discovery capabilities, teams can not only quickly find relevant data but also understand its context and quality. This improved visibility reduces the time spent searching for data and enhances decision-making speed, while ensuring data remains accurate and governed throughout its lifecycle.

An augmented data catalog goes beyond simply listing data sources and assets but collects and augments the necessary metadata to fuel recommendations.
A knowledge graph provides further information about relationships between data that help power recommendations.

Knowledge Graph

A knowledge graph dynamically maps relationships between different data points, providing a deeper understanding of how data is interconnected across the organization. It visualizes these relationships, helping users to explore data in context and discover previously hidden patterns or insights. This capability is especially useful for uncovering complex insights from diverse datasets, including both structured and unstructured data, supporting more accurate, data-driven decision-making.

Active Metadata

Active metadata continuously interacts with your data environment, constantly updating itself in real time based on data usage, user activity, and operational changes. Unlike traditional passive metadata, active metadata adapts dynamically, which not only enhances data quality but also strengthens governance by automating workflows. It provides intelligent, context-aware recommendations that help optimize how data is used and managed, reducing manual intervention and making data governance more proactive and effective.

Active metadata helps to both automatically discover and rank data and data products as well as to verify data products and explain recommendations.
Recommendation engine that automatically finds and accesses the relevant data across data sources with full explanability of results.

Recommendation Engine

The recommendation engine harnesses the power of AI to analyze user behavior, data context, and patterns within your data. Based on this analysis, it suggests relevant datasets, insights, or next actions that align with the user's needs. This intelligent guidance significantly reduces the time needed to find the right data, helping users to make decisions faster and with greater confidence. By ensuring that the most accurate and valuable data is readily available, it enhances overall data quality and operational efficiency.

Data Preparation & Data Delivery

Automated data preparation transforms raw data into clean, ready-to-use insights by applying automated enrichment and transformation processes. This eliminates the need for manual data preparation, allowing teams to quickly move from raw data to actionable insights. Once prepared, the data is delivered seamlessly to the right users or applications, ensuring that trustworthy, analysis-ready data is available when needed. This efficiency speeds up the entire data workflow, from ingestion to insight generation, improving productivity and reducing bottlenecks.

Automated generation of SQL code that streamlines the data preparation process.
A data fabric provides seamless integration between different data sources leveraging data virtualization as the main integration technology.

Data Integration

Simplify the integration of data from various sources, whether it's structured, semi-structured, or unstructured. A data fabric acts as a unified framework that connects disparate data systems, ensuring smooth and seamless data flow across all environments. By eliminating the need for complex data processing via ETL, a data fabric enables real-time access and integration, which in turn accelerates data-driven initiatives and enhances operational efficiency.

Data & AI Orchestration

Data and AI orchestration automates the coordination of data workflows and AI processes, ensuring that data is efficiently processed and delivered to the right systems or users. This streamlined orchestration minimizes delays, reduces manual intervention, and ensures that both data and AI models work together seamlessly. Whether you're dealing with structured or unstructured data, AI orchestration optimizes the flow of data to drive timely insights and better decision-making across the organization.

Orchestration panel to manage a tenant and assign user roles and permissions, as well as govern data contracts
Data marketplace to publish, share, and consume ready to use data products

Publish & Consume

A data marketplace provides a centralized platform where teams can publish and consume data products across the organization. With built-in AI-driven recommendations and self-service capabilities, even non-technical users can quickly discover and access the most relevant data for their needs. This democratization of data access empowers every user in the organization to make data-driven decisions, fostering greater collaboration and significantly accelerating the pace of innovation.

Data Fabric Use Cases

Data fabric enables various use cases and fosters innovation in the business by providing a framework that combines high agility with strong governance.

Accelerating the Adoption of Trusted Generative AI: Build AI-Ready Data Assets

In order to scale Generative AI (Gen AI) in enterprise environments, organizations need a framework that allows secure, governed, and efficient data access. Data fabric achieves this by combining data products, active metadata, prompt offloading, and a single API for seamless integration with LLMs. This holistic approach simplifies data integration and governance while ensuring reliable data delivery. Data products provide reusable, curated datasets with relevant metadata, while active metadata enriches data with lineage, quality, and governance insights. Prompt offloading enhances security by structuring and filtering prompts, while the unified API abstracts data access complexities, creating a trusted, efficient data ecosystem for AI applications.

Self-Service Data Access with AI: Empower Every User

Empower every user in your organization—whether they are data analysts, analytics engineers, data scientists, business analysts, or other less technical teams—to easily access and query data on demand. A data fabric equipped with AI-powered data discovery tools allows users to tap into big data and perform analyses without the need for IT intervention or deep technical expertise. By simplifying the way data is accessed, you unlock faster insights and improve productivity across departments. With self-service capabilities, users can find, explore, and leverage the data they need to make timely, informed decisions, which can significantly boost operational efficiency and innovation.

Modernizing and De-risking Changes to Data Platforms: Flexibility and Consistency

Adapt to evolving business needs and technology advancements with confidence. Data fabric provides a unified data access layer that abstracts the complexities of the underlying infrastructure, enabling smooth transitions, such as migrating to new cloud platforms or consolidating legacy systems. This ensures consistent data access for users and applications, minimizing disruptions during platform changes. By maintaining a seamless data experience, data fabric allows organizations to innovate and optimize their data architectures at their own pace, without compromising business continuity or operational efficiency.

Breaking Down Data Silos and Overcoming Data Fragmentation: Unified Data Views

Address the challenge of data silos and fragmented data sources with a data fabric that unifies disparate datasets across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. This seamless data integration provides a single, consistent view of all enterprise data, enabling cross-functional analytics and deeper insights into business operations. By breaking down silos, data fabric enhances collaboration, improves data quality, and ensures that teams across the organization are working with accurate, consolidated data. This unified approach to data management ultimately drives more efficient and informed decision-making.

Real-Time Data Analytics: Make Informed Decisions Instantly

Leverage real-time data to make faster, more informed decisions across your entire organization. By analyzing live data streams from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured sources, a data fabric enables you to react quickly to changing market conditions or operational challenges. With real-time analytics, businesses can move beyond static reports and dashboards, gaining up-to-the-minute insights that drive agility and responsiveness. This not only helps you stay ahead of the competition but also empowers teams to make data-driven decisions at critical moments, enhancing business outcomes and customer experiences.

Strengthen Data Governance and Compliance: Ensure Security and Integrity

Ensure strong data governance and compliance across all environments with automated tools that maintain control over data access, usage, and security. A data fabric helps you implement real-time data governance by automating policy enforcement, tracking data lineage, and ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and other industry-specific rules. By maintaining a clear view of how data flows through your systems and who has access to it, you can ensure the highest levels of data integrity and security. This reduces the risk of compliance violations and enhances trust in your data management practices, which is crucial for regulatory audits and business transparency.

Agile Data Development: Accelerate Innovation and Time-to-Market

Support agile development methodologies by quickly integrating and preparing data from a variety of sources. A data fabric enables your teams to prototype, test, and deploy new data-driven solutions with speed and flexibility, accelerating the innovation process. Whether you're developing new machine learning models, building customer insights, or enhancing operational processes, the agility of a data fabric allows you to pivot quickly and adjust to new business needs. This reduces time to market and helps your organization stay competitive in a fast-evolving data landscape.

Frequently Asked Questions

Dedicated Data Fabric Resources

The Data Fabric Guide For Data & Analytics Leaders
Cover of the eBook Demystifying Data Fabric: A Comprehensive Guide for Data & Analytics Leaders
7 Data Fabric Use Cases for the Modern Enterprise
Explore seven of the most common data fabric use cases in this report.
Webinar: The CDO's Guide for Implementing Gen AI
Watch the Webinar: The CDO's Guide to Implementing Gen AI for Analytics from Kaycee Lai, Founder of Promethium
Stop letting your business wait months for data with the first and only Instant Data Fabric. 

Learn about the Promethium difference today.
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