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93 views10 pages

Data Analytics Essentials

Uploaded by

pdelgadoj-prov
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Gartner Research

Data and Analytics


Essentials: How to
Define, Build and
Operationalize a
Data Fabric

Ehtisham Zaidi

16 May 2023
Data and Analytics Essentials: How to Define, Build
and Operationalize a Data Fabric
Published 16 May 2023 - ID G00790376 - 6 min read

Ehtisham Zaidi

Data fabric is an emergent data management design that


promises to reduce the time to integrated data delivery through
active metadata-assisted automation. Data and analytics leaders
can use this presentation to explain the data fabric and help build a
comprehensive data management infrastructure.

Additional Perspectives

■ Summary Translation + Localization: Data and Analytics Essentials: How to Define,


Build and Operationalize a Data Fabric
(18 September 2023)

The Challenge
Most organizations struggle with a comprehensive data management design that allows
them to optimally collect, connect, integrate and deliver distributed data from
heterogeneous data sources and applications for their data and analytics (D&A) use-
case demands. The number of data and application silos has surged in the last decade,
while the number of skilled personnel in data teams has either stayed constant or
dropped. As a result, the time deficit between when a request for integrated data is
raised to when the request is fulfilled is now at an all-time high.

The growing popularity of cloud for data management has only increased the complexity
of creating and maintaining a consistent data management architecture that caters to all
existing and upcoming requests for data integration.

Gartner, Inc. | G00790376 Page 1 of 7


The Promise of Data Fabric
Data fabrics have emerged as an increasingly popular design choice to simplify an
organization’s data integration infrastructure and create a scalable architecture that
reduces the technical debt seen in most D&A teams due to the rising integration challenge.
The intent is to not only address cost or create elegant design, but to gradually introduce
data utilization, context analysis and alignment use cases.

A data fabric is a data management design concept for attaining flexible, reusable and
augmented data pipelines and services in support of various operational and analytics
use cases. Data fabrics support a combination of different data integration styles, and
utilize active metadata, knowledge graphs, semantics and machine learning to augment
data integration design and delivery (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Defining a Data Fabric

Gartner, Inc. | G00790376 Page 2 of 7


The promise of the design concept is that once implemented, data fabrics would
significantly eliminate manual data integration tasks and augment (and in some cases
completely automate) data integration design and delivery. However, it is important to
note that data fabrics are still not completely mature (see Hype Cycle for Data
Management, 2022). No single vendor currently delivers all the mature components (in an
integrated manner) that are needed to stitch together the data fabric (which means that
data fabrics cannot be yet purchased from a single vendor). Data fabric also consists of a
mix of mature and less mature technology components. Organizations will therefore have
to carefully mix and match composable technology components as their use cases
evolve, and would need to know where and how to begin with their data fabric design
planning and implementation.

The Challenges Organizations Face When Planning and Implementing Data


Fabrics
D&A leaders face challenges beyond just the technological components of data fabric.
These challenges include:

■ Defining what data fabric is and therefore failing to demonstrate how it leverages
currently implemented technology solutions.

■ Obtaining stakeholder support, which requires demonstrations of incremental


benefits for incremental costs instead of “all automated” or “all new” solutions.

■ Getting started with creating a data fabric and knowing the main steps they need to
follow.

D&A leaders pursuing current implementations report that skills, roles and team
management are the key components to success and not necessarily the tools and
software. They have learned that tools and platforms are the enabling technology for a
data fabric and consist of solutions already deployed, the metadata that represents
experience and learning patterns from those existing use-cases, and adding technology
only when the team and conditions highlight gaps.

How This Presentation Helps


This presentation is a direct response to the challenges described above. It is divided into
three logical segments to address the main challenges around data fabrics:

Gartner, Inc. | G00790376 Page 3 of 7


1. The first segment goes into detail about the “what” and the “why.” Business teams
and key stakeholders will learn the definition and benefits of data fabric and learn
why it is essential to adopt data fabric design, particularly for any organization
struggling with data silos. It also explains how data fabric benefits organizations
that need automation in their data management tasks to support overburdened data
integration and data engineering teams.

2. The second segment of the presentation addresses the common question, “How do I
stitch together the data fabric, and what are the components needed to do so?”
This introduces D&A leaders in their strategic roadmap assessment to the key
composable components and technology parts needed to deliver their data fabric. It
also touches on the discipline (in this case, DataOps) and the team structures and
skills needed to make the data fabric more usable. Next, D&A leaders are guided
through three paths to production for common use cases, which will help them get
started (and get some important wins under their belt to keep the business
interested). They can then progress to more advanced paths that support use cases
that need knowledge graphs for highly interconnected datasets. Finally, the data
fabric can move into the final frontier: the automation path that supports
automation of various tedious, error-prone and repetitive data management tasks by
activating metadata and analyzing it.

3. The final part of this presentation — the “where” — will allow D&A leaders to
navigate the complex vendor landscape to select mature technology components
from established vendor markets. We explain which types of technology choices are
needed and how they can be assembled. Finally, the presentation provides some
cautions (based on the mistakes that Gartner has noticed early stage adopters
make) and a representative list of vendors that can be investigated for implementing
data fabrics.

Please review the Notes Section for each slide, which explains and builds on the ideas
represented in each slide in detail.

Gartner, Inc. | G00790376 Page 4 of 7


Recommended Actions for Data and Analytics Leaders
■ Use well-established integration technology and standards. Migrating to unknown
standards (without availability of adequate skills) will lead to a poor adoption of the
data fabric.

■ Invest in augmented data catalogs to inventory all types of metadata assets along
with their associated relationships in a flexible data model on a graph.

■ Ensure that the data fabric allows business teams to contribute and enrich the data
models with semantics and taxonomies/ontologies.

■ Provision a data fabric architecture that has the capability to combine various data
integration styles (such as extraction, transformation and loading with data
virtualization).

■ Start by evaluating your existing tools (such as metadata management, data


integration/data virtualization, semantics and database management systems) to
identify the existing, overlapping or missing capabilities needed to deliver the data
fabric design.

These presentation slides are most useful to data and analytics leaders who are working
to educate their stakeholders. Gartner clients working to get buy-in for their business case
to modernize the data management infrastructure can use this simple presentation
format to help executives understand the role and importance of data fabric.

Recommended by the Authors


Quick Answer: What Is Data Fabric Design?

Quick Answer: What Is Data Mesh?

Data and Analytics Essentials: Data Fabric and Data Mesh

Quick Answer: Comparing Data Fabric and Data Mesh

5 Ways to Enhance Your Data Engineering Practices

From Logical Data Warehouse to Data Fabric

Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools

Gartner, Inc. | G00790376 Page 5 of 7


Evidence
These presentation slides include content from:

■ 2022 Gartner State of Data and Analytics Cloud Adoption Survey (see below)

■ Client inquiries, Gartner search analytics, Google trends, Gartner social media
analysis of emerging technology topics in May 2022

2022 Gartner State of Data and Analytics Cloud Adoption Survey: This survey was
conducted to validate and understand how end-user organizations are practicing and
planning their journeys to perform data and analytics in the cloud, and what the key
drivers are for such a transition.The research was conducted online from October through
November 2022 among 461 respondents from North America, EMEA and Asia/Pacific.
The respondents were from the manufacturing, natural resources, healthcare provider,
banking and finance, IT, retail and wholesale, government, education, media and
communications, transportation, and utility industries, in organizations with more than
250 full-time employees.The respondents were screened for being in director roles and
higher, having responsibility for adopting cloud or planning it, and having some visibility
or involvement in financial decision making for cloud adoption.

Document Revision History


Data and Analytics Essentials: Data Fabric - 13 July 2021

Gartner, Inc. | G00790376 Page 6 of 7


© 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of
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third party. For further information, see "Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity." Gartner
research may not be used as input into or for the training or development of generative artificial
intelligence, machine learning, algorithms, software, or related technologies.

Gartner, Inc. | G00790376 Page 7 of 7


Actionable, objective insight
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