As the amount of raw data in our world continues to grow exponentially, companies and organizations are undergoing a digital transformation in order to keep up. Cloud environments just aren’t strong enough to hold back the flood of unstructured data that comes from the many sources of data that companies use such as applications, websites, and physical devices. A data manager might try to solve the problem by moving their databases onto silos, but this can severely corrupt the data integrity and hinder a company’s ability to grant data access to its international branches.
Companies that have decided to move to a data fabric solution are realizing that they gain a competitive advantage from the real-time insights other benefits that data fabric provides. Let’s take a closer look at data fabric, and why it solves some of the most crucial problems facing data scientists and companies today.
Big data is only getting bigger.
It doesn’t matter what products or services a company is selling, an organization’s ability to leverage its data assets has become crucial to its survival. Companies that don’t take advantage of the insights that can be learned from data engineers and passed onto the decision-makers often fall behind the companies do. However, the biggest issue that data analysts face is not performing analytics, but finding places to store and organize the unimaginable amounts of data that flood their databases every day.
Although data may seem small and unobtrusive, it’s currently making a mess for companies that have more data than they know what to do with. Due to storage issues and disorganization, the valuable information that companies could be using to gain a competitive edge is often located in different on-premises servers, as well as hybrid cloud environments. This means that the data is maintained on different file systems and databases, so there is no continuity, creating more and more barriers between companies and their valuable data. Because data is growing rapidly for all companies, these problems will only continue to worsen for organizations that have not implemented data fabric solutions.
No more data silos, lakes, or warehouses.
Many organizations use data lakes, data warehouses, and silos to try and solve this big data problem, but this only acts as a bandaid and does not solve the deeper issue. In fact, silos can often make the problem worse because they limit data access to a select group, meaning that decision-makers are bound to the location of their servers.
As a consequence, useful and important data can stay unused and forgotten in the back of a dusty silo for years. This means that data is not paying rent on the expensive storage it takes to maintain it. Companies are losing money two-fold: by throwing cash away on storage for data they can’t actually use, and by missing out on valuable insights that are lost when data remains unaccessed.
A data fabric, on the other hand, allows the company to extract their data from the source point no matter where they are in the world. This breaks the chains of silos that give decision-makers the ultimatum of staying on-premises or missing out on important information. Data fabric software allows useful information to be processed in real-time, giving organizations more options, more storage space, and more freedom.
Enhanced quality, availability, and insights.
One of the biggest frustrations that data engineers face is the fact that less and less of their jobs have become about data. Due to the device-intensive nature of silos and data lakes, analysts have to deal more and more with hardware issues and spend less than 25% of their time addressing issues that require advanced analytics. This is a waste of the analysts’ time and a huge waste of money. Data is only valuable if companies can use it to learn more about their customers, the market, and themselves.
When data becomes inaccessible and forgotten it becomes highly likely that data integrity will become comprised. This is especially true when different types of data exist in multiple locations on separate file servers. This kind of storage solution was not designed to face the big data problems we face today.
Data fabric solutions have become the future of big data because they are the best way to profit from your data without wasting money on storage space for data that is unusable. Data fabric was built to anticipate the big data problem and give companies the data integration tools they will need to survive in the changing data world by making all data operate in a single environment, providing continuity, organization, and peace of mind.
2018 ·
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