In November Zimpatica sponsored Appian Europe, where industry leaders came together to share insights, perspectives, and best practices focused on helping businesses discover, design, and automate workflows with Appian. Among the many topics discussed, data fabric emerged as a hot new trend for the coming year—and with good reason: as data continues to explode, the number of environments and interdependencies are also increasing. Current data management architectures are not equipped to connect the various data points and systems across the enterprise; more needs to be done to unify and integrate data and data siloes to power profound business success.

What exactly is data fabric? Gartner describes it as “a design concept that serves as an integrated layer (fabric) of data and connecting processes.” Unlike a data lake that stores raw data, or a data warehouse that stores processed and refined data, data fabric is a flexible data architecture that continuously identifies and connects data from multiple sources in one composite model to deliver integrated data to all users. In essence, data fabric powers living, breathing operational data that is transacted upon to power your business every day.

Businesses that have a data fabric architecture in place to connect diverse forms of data from disparate sources report greater efficiencies, improved productivity, and an increased ability to respond to change. Plus, research from Gartner revealed that data fabric can reduce time for integration design by 30%, deployment by 30%, and maintenance by 70%.1

With its proven ability to reveal unique relationship points between available data across systems, data fabric is expected to play a crucial role in helping businesses harness the power of data, AI, and analytics to drive profitable decisions and support a strong competitive advantage. By 2024, data fabric deployments are expected to boost data utilization efficiency by 400% and cut human-driven data management tasks in half, according to Gartner.2

Though the data fabric spans all corners of an organization, offering profound, interwoven benefits, building a data fabric has never been simpler with Appian’s 22.4 release, which features codeless data fabric. A virtual data layer that connects all of your existing systems and joins them together, Appian’s data fabric offers power and agility for faster development and apps that integrate with any third-party system—with no data migration or APIs required.

Put simply, codeless data fabric lets you keep your data where it is—across different applications, tools, and processes—while offering a fast, scalable way to unify it and build organizational workflows and apps that were previously unachievable. More specifically, Appian’s data fabric capability allows you to: 

• Accelerate application development

• Scale data processing and analysis capabilities as needed

• Process, update, and analyze data in real-time

• Simplify and accelerate your most critical business processes

• Enjoy enhanced data security across all systems

With the power to seamlessly integrate data, improve data quality, simplify data sharing, and standardize data management practices across multiple endpoints, data fabric is radically changing the way data is managed and used to power business growth.

To learn more about how data fabric can support your business processes and workflows, or for information about Appian’s data fabric functionality, contact us here.

1 https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-data-and-analytics-trends-for-2021

2 https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/insights/data-and-analytics-essential-guides