With the ever-expanding world of tech and millions of data points generated every second, the movement and storage of data have become increasingly important. This data must also be clean and understandable, and it must enable accurate decisions.
Using the most effective tools available when storing and moving data is essential for your business to remain competitive and achieve long-term success. That's why more companies are turning to data fabrics. A data fabric for processing data and allowing AI machine learning is one of the best solutions for saving you time, money, and resources.
How Data Provides an Advantage
We live in an era of rapid change. Data drives competitive advantage for every business looking to succeed and grow, which means companies must provide data as quickly as possible to meet business and customer demands. In a McKinsey survey with some of the top-earning companies, respondents reported that their data and analytics are responsible for at least 20% of their business success within the last three years. This shows how important it is to understand your data points properly and, more importantly, make business decisions based on that information.
Challenges of Managing Your Data
As data becomes more critical to the success of every business, data management has never been so challenging.
One of the most common issues with data is that it is often siloed, making data distribution hard to achieve. In addition, with many companies still using legacy infrastructure, they often experience difficulties when transferring data to various cloud-based platforms such as AWS or Azure.
Another data result that becomes bloated and disorganized is when data scientists attempt to extract insights from data. Without a well-defined strategy, the data scientist will spend more time working on their queries than providing insight into business decisions.
The good news is data fabric solutions exist to make the data collection process more effective.
What Is a Data Fabric?
A data fabric is a system that combines human and machine capabilities to access data in place and consolidate it when necessary. Gartner defines data fabric as a design concept that serves as an integrated layer (fabric) of data and connecting processes. It continuously discovers distinct, business-relevant connections between the available data points by identifying and connecting data from different applications.
Why a Data Fabric?
With data often transferred from one location to another, cleaning up that data can be a nightmare. A data fabric allows data to move easily between sources without the time and resources required for data cleansing — saving you money and time.
Data fabric also provides an opportunity for personalization of your product or service using customer data. If used correctly, it allows companies to make more informed decisions based on their user information. This will lead them to develop better products at lower costs or offer new services they previously couldn't because of a lack of knowledge about their customer's needs (and wants).
The best part is there's no need for software development; APIs are already built into the system, making quick work of any changes required down the road.
Advantages of a Data Fabric
There are many advantages to using data fabric. Here are some of the notable benefits of why you should start using one today:
- The data fabric provides a scalable architecture for data exchange.
- Latency decreases as the data flows are more lightweight and flexible, allowing them to be easily re-run should any problems arise.
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Management of data dependencies is easier due to code that's automatically generated in advance and behind the scenes — meaning less time spent debugging these issues.
- Data is more secure as data can be encrypted and rolled up for better distribution.
- Easy adjustments to changes in data sources or data formats allow you to make real-time decisions based on new data points.
The Power of an ETL and Data Fabric
ETLs can be beneficial for data management as they provide an easy way to execute data transformation processes. Combining a powerful ETL such as Integrate.io with a data fabric can ensure the seamless transfer and management of data.
Movement is an essential part of understanding data, and powerful ETL tools can ensure the data is transferred and usable. These tools also clean the data automatically.
In addition, the data fabric allows for frictionless access and sharing of data in a distributed data environment. It provides a single, consistent data management architecture that enables seamless data access and processing across otherwise compartmentalized storage systems.
Stacking Integrate.io and Data Fabric
Data fabric solutions have made data management easier than ever. Due to built-in AI and machine learning, a data fabric used along with a best-in-class ETL like Integrate.io can help unlock the power of data analytics for your business. In addition, data that is clean and transferred securely help you achieve your business goals.
Integrate.io's data management solution is a gateway from which data can be processed and accessed through the data fabric via APIs. Moving data across different systems and providing powerful ETL capabilities such as Data Augmentation and Model Management make Xplenty an effective tool for data-driven businesses.
For more information on how Integrate.io can help you and your business, reach out to the Integrate.io team today to set up a demo.