Introduction
Today more than ever before, organizations are striving to gain a competitive edge, deliver more value to customers, reduce risk, respond more quickly to the needs of the business, and out-innovate the competition. To achieve these goals, organizations need easy access to a single view of accurate, current, consistent, and trusted data. However, the increasing complexity and number of data sources and data volumes make this difficult to achieve in practice. As data grows, so too does the prevalence of data silos, making accessing, integrating, and leveraging data from internal and external data sources a challenge.
A Smarter Approach to Data Management
Recently, enterprise data fabrics have emerged as a much-needed architectural approach that is providing organizations with visibility and access to data from across the entire business, without the limitations typically associated with prior approaches. Data fabrics can integrate, transform, and harmonize data from disparate sources—on demand—to make it usable and actionable for a wide range of business applications.
Smart data fabrics take this approach a step further by incorporating a wide range of analytics capabilities, including data exploration, business intelligence, natural language processing, complex business rules, and machine learning directly within the fabric, enabling organizations to gain new insights and power intelligent and prescriptive services and applications.
In contrast with earlier approaches, data fabrics allow applications and line-of-business personnel to access information from source systems on demand, as it’s needed, eliminating the latencies usually associated with data lakes, data warehouses, data marts, and manual techniques. Data that resides in different applications, silos, and sources inside and outside the organization can be accessed, integrated, harmonized, and even analyzed as it’s accessed, without the need to create yet another copy of the data. It is a fundamentally different approach that is bringing quantitative business benefits to every industry.
Cutting Through The Complexity
The challenge, however, is that implementing a data fabric can require dozens of data management services and products, resulting in complex architectures, delayed and unwieldy implementations, cumbersome maintenance, and a high total cost of ownership.
Addressing this key challenge, InterSystems IRIS® data platform is next-generation data management software that speeds and simplifies the implementation and maintenance of smart data fabric architectures. It is a comprehensive cloud-first product built from the ground up on a consistent architecture that provides many of the functional capabilities required for implementing data fabrics to power a wide range of critical enterprise applications, including Business 360, Customer 360, Supply Chain Visibility, IT/OT Convergence for Manufacturing, and Member 360 for Healthcare.