The Business Case for Data Fabric

What it Does

A data fabric is an architecture and set of data services that provide consistent capabilities across a selection of endpoints spanning hybrid multi-cloud environments. It combines the tools and practices of data integration and management, abstracted in a modern form, to create a service allowing easy to build and maintain analytics and applications.

Benefits

• Reduce data engineer and IT FTE workload by 25% by aggregating massive amounts of data from multiple sources.
• Save 65 to 70% of data discovery, analysis, and implementation time by data analysts and engineers.
• Recognize data management efficiency increases of 20% in year two and 33% in year three.
• Realize data integration and governance benefits of 60% in year two and an additional 25% in year three.

Urgency

High: Data sources increase by orders of magnitude, while data volumes grow 50% to 100% per month. Data management targets are changing to drive more value even as structured data enables enterprises to combine disparate data to solve business problems. Real-time data is now essential to prompt decision-making with actionable business intelligence.

Risk Level

Moderate: Legacy approaches to integration are insufficient, so there’s a need to transition from ETL to ELT even as data lakes and mesh proliferate. Data fabrics must integrate with these new technologies to be successful. This change is producing a skills gap across data management, data scientists, and data analysts that organizations must confront.

30/60/90 Plan

• 30 days: Assess the existing landscape and develop a foundation.
• 60 days: Implement the platform and begin pilot data integration.
• 90 days: Expand data integration to all sources and consumers by leveraging lessons learned from pilot to scale to the rest of the enterprise.

Time to Value

Expect to see value within 90 days of integrating all primary data. The payback should be achieved within the first year, with full realization of ROI in 18 to 24 months.