Gartner® Hype Cycle™ provides a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. Gartner Hype Cycle methodology provides a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a sound source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of your specific business goals.
According to Gartner® in the Hype Cycle for Data Management, 2024, “Future data architecture technologies and disciplines are currently heading into or passing through the trough: DataOps, data fabric, active metadata management, and augmented data cataloging/metadata management solutions.” I believe that the Trough of Disillusionment is a promising stage of development since it leads from hype to reality. And there’s one technology in that phase that I’d like to focus on in this blog post: data fabric, a technology pattern that is very close to Denodo’s DNA.
What is Data Fabric?
Now that data fabric has emerged from the Peak of Inflated expectations, it’s a good time to take a fresh look at it. In the Gartner Glossary, data fabric is defined in these terms:
“It’s a new and evolving data management design:
- For attaining flexible, reusable, and augmented data integration pipelines
- That utilizes knowledge graphs, semantics, and active metadata-based automation
- In support of faster and, in some cases, automated data access and sharing
- Regardless of deployment options, use cases (operational or analytical), and/or architectural approaches.
It is not one single tool or technology.”
Additionally, in the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Data Management, 2024, Gartner has this to say about why data fabric is important:
“Data fabric:
- Leverages traditional approaches while enabling the enterprise to adopt technology advances and avoids “rip and replace.”
- Capitalizes on sunk costs and simultaneously provides prioritization and cost control guidance for new spending in data management.
- Leverages existing platforms/architectures or implementation approaches. It offers flexibility and extensibility in infrastructure for humans or machines to ensure that their integrated data is consumable across multiple use cases and across a multicloud or hybrid architecture and edge ecosystem.”
And Gartner has this say about the business impact of data fabric:
“Data fabric:
- Acts as an intelligent orchestration engine on top of distributed data stores to provide guidance on optimal data access, integration, and delivery without always recommending further data replication or rip-and-replace of existing systems.
- Provides insights to data engineers by automating repeatable integration tasks and supporting design and delivery guidance.
- Adds semantic knowledge for context and meaning.
- Reduces maintenance and support costs associated with managing data.”
Data Fabric: The Denodo View
Based on the Gartner glossary definition, we believe that there is no “out-of-the-box” data fabric, that no vendor is capable of delivering “two or three acres of data fabric,” as if data fabric were truly a kind of fabric.
Rather, a data fabric is an interconnected data infrastructure, defined by each individual organization. What companies need, and what Denodo provides with our logical data management capabilities, is the ability to easily establish a data fabric. Because the Denodo Platform enables real-time, logical connections to disparate data sources, without replication, the Denodo Platform makes it very straightforward to set up a system of interconnected data, or a data fabric.
The Denodo Platform leverages active metadata to monitor usage in real time, across myriad different systems that would otherwise be siloed. With these capabilities, it enables alerts and triggers, to turn a data fabric into an automated, responsive system.
One of the most important capabilities of the Denodo Platform, from a data fabric perspective, is that it operates at the same, high-performance level, across the widest variety of data sources and consuming applications, including AI applications, while respecting granular data governance and security policies. With a Denodo data fabric between a large language model (LLM) and a company’s diverse internal data sources, LLMs will access only the most trusted, relevant data to deliver its responses.
Create a Data Fabric
To learn more about creating a data fabric within your organization, one that can connect disparate data in service of functionality that is more powerful than the sum of its parts, visit the logical data management and data fabric pages of denodo.com.
Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Data Management, 2024, By Aaron Rosenbaum, 8 July 2024
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