Data Fabric

Data Fabric is an architecture concept for connecting, managing and making data usable consistently across different systems, locations and cloud environments – a uniform data layer over distributed holdings.

Core elements are an overarching metadata layer with data catalogs, uniform access and security policies regardless of storage location, and mechanisms for data mobility between data center, clouds and edge locations. The basis for this is powerful Data Integration, which connects sources without physically consolidating all data. The concept must be distinguished from the data mesh, which solves the same challenge primarily organizationally (decentralized data responsibility in business domains), whereas the data fabric relies on a technical unification layer – the two approaches are not mutually exclusive.

For organizations, a data fabric is less a product than an operating model for distributed data holdings: it reduces silos, improves governance and makes data more easily available for analytics, AI and recovery. With hybrid cloud and AI workloads, the concept is gaining further importance as the target picture of Data Management.