Data fabric software is a unified data platform that enables organizations to integrate their data and data management processes. Adopting a data fabric allows for the creation of complete views of their data, helping power existing processes and applications and enabling the rapid development of new use cases. A data fabric is not just a single solution but an entire data ecosystem that connects disparate data sources and infrastructure types across locations (on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid environments), enabling analysis without onerous data integration requirements. The software offers benefits such as the ability to explore and extract value from any form of data regardless of location by connecting stores of structured and unstructured data. It provides centralized access via a single, unified view of an organization's data that inherits access and governance restrictions.
Companies use data fabric software to gain greater visibility into often highly complex and heterogeneous data landscapes. Data fabric software offers deeper insights and control over their data irrespective of where it sits, enabling better business decisions and strategies. Helping businesses become data-driven is key to the emergence of data fabric software and it can be adopted by any industry vertical. Fraud detection and security management, sales and marketing management, and governance and compliance management are some of the major use cases driving the growth of data fabric.
To qualify for inclusion in the Data Fabric category, a product must:
Perform data management processes on a single unified platform
Pull and connect or collaborate on data from disparate sources across locations
Manage data across all environments (multi-cloud and on-premises)
Allow single, seamless access and control to data across sources and types
Provide analytics tools and connectivity to other analytical solutions
Offer metadata functionality with data currency and data lineage capabilities
