Driving Continuous Innovations with SAP’s Enterprise Data Fabric

“There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.” 

Eric Schmidt – Ex CEO Google

In a rapidly transforming digital world, new players have an inherent advantage over legacy competitors. A strong digital core powers these new-age native players, complemented by the scalability and flexibility of multi-cloud architectures. A distributed architecture enables these players to build nimble and agile services, enabling real-time data analysis, and AI-driven business decisions. Making optimal use of data across ecosystems, these -age digital enterprises can match the size of legacy players with innovations.

To compete in the fast lane, it becomes imperative for organizations to improve resilience and be nimble to compete with the Digital Natives. This requires a complete relook at how data is consumed within the organization. A revamped architecture that enables intuitive data integration and transformation and easy access to complex data would be a key ask for such organizations. However, this is easier said than done. Traditional IT organizations must reach out to disparate systems to source data, complicating the need to have a single version of the truth. Moreover, upgrades, fixes, and workarounds further add to the complexity of managing data to drive value and decisions across the organization.

A Brief Overview of Data Fabric

Data Fabric is an architecture for modern data management that enables a common platform for data across multiple applications to be consumed within the organization. The data traverses the organizational landscape through pipelines that can be adapted and adopted to suit the needs of diverse consumers. Instead of static data marts, a Data Fabric architecture would enable -on-demand access to data that can be integrated, transformed, and consumed via a semantic layer. This architecture minimizes the complexity of curating data by automating workflows and processes, generating workflows, and streamlining data.

The key features of a Data Fabric architecture are:

1. Self-service data management capabilities
2. Deliver consistent, accurate, and managed data across the enterprise
3. Automated pipelines for seamless ingestion and distribution of data

A typical Data Fabric architecture would span across hybrid multi-cloud environments. The powerful architecture would enable complex data management across cloud and on-premises a edge environments.

Figure 1: Components of Data Fabric

SAP’s Vision for a Data Fabric

SAP enables the enterprise data fabric for its customers primarily through the Business Technology platform. Recognized as a leader as per the Forrester Wave[i] for 2020, the following guiding principles drive SAP’s data fabric vision:

1. Integrate seamlessly across multiple data sources.
2. Deliver quality data
3. Ensure wider data adoption through democratization
4. Orchestrate data across hybrid landscapes
5. Consume across hybrid data engines

Given the above guiding principles and the alignment to the Data Fabric components, SAP’s suite of products driving the data fabric is primarily driven by the below across the BTP:

1. SAP Data Intelligence:

Enables seamless data orchestration across multiple landscapes and engines, including non-SAP.

2. SAP HANA:

Delivers in-memory data management, storage, and processing, driving superior performance and maximizing value.

3. SAP Integration Suite:

Acts as the Integration mechanism to the enterprise data bus and conventional integration mechanisms.

Typical Benefits from SAP Data Fabric:

SAP’s data fabric architecture entails multiple benefits for the enterprise. The key benefits are as listed below:

1. Seamless data orchestration:

SAP Data Intelligence enables connecting multiple data silos and integrating into a seamless data stream. With pre-configured rules and governance standards, data can be made available on-demand, enabling teams always to have a 360-degree view of data.

2. Optimized total cost of ownership:

With HANA Cloud and BTP, the cost of ownership is considerably reduced. Since a data fabric enables seamless, composable data architecture, new pipelines can be easily created and integrated with the enterprise data stream with minimal impact on existing architecture.

3. Prescriptive actions:

SAP Data Intelligence enables enterprises to take the quantum jump to the next level of Business Intelligence from predictive to prescriptive analytics. Actions can be driven by a complete 360-degree view of existing data and predictive functions, enabling a higher confidence level for decisions.

4. Rapid compliance:

Global and local data security norms demand compliance with deadlines to ensure business continuity. The exercise does not always meet with expected results. Data fabric enables rapidly scaling up compliance measures and security norms to ensure minimal impact on business.

Conclusion:

A Data Fabric enables driving democratization of data across the enterprise by automating data streams through orchestrating mechanisms. SAP, a leader in Data Fabric products, delivers its vision for the same via the SAP BTP suite of products. As data is further democratized through self-service, SAP’s suite of products ensures data to value by driving data-driven decisions and machine-assisted predictions, driving up momentum and efficiencies across the business spectrum.