Data fabric focus to drive bandwidth, compute capacity demand

Data fabric is expected to be a key focus area for organisations this year, as they look to optimise the value of their data. This is a logical progression, as organisations spread across regional boundaries and increasingly need to integrate external data into their planning and forecasting, and seek to automate ingestion, integration and exploration, embed governance, and enable self-service across the enterprise. Data fabrics add a semantic layer to data lakes, making the vast volumes of data spread across a complex ecosystem of devices, applications and data infrastructure more readily available for consumption and reducing time to delivery. Unlike data mesh, which connects data on the fly and plugs in various functionalities, a data fabric is architecturally in place – with data interlinked, partitioned and served up off a platform. Data warehouses and data lakes are becoming limited in terms of functionality – they have become too large and may not have all the data the organisation needs, including data from external sources such as weather patterns or social media behaviour.