Don’t underestimate the value of a data fabric

The amount of data available to today’s finance teams can seem overwhelming. This is especially true in their relatively new role as data stewards within an organization – tasked with providing seamless data access, views and analytics crossdepartmentally to financial and non-financial data.

Enter the data fabric, an emerging data management design that enables augmented data integration and sharing across heterogeneous data sources.

For CFOs who look after complex data and finance IT landscapes, utilizing a data fabric provides business users easy access to data and increased performance and business agility while minimizing the total cost of finance – the ability to operate better, faster and at a lower cost.

The benefits are broad but can include:

• Empowering finance – and business users generally – to create data models and consume data without the need for coding experience.

• Flexibility in the choice of database application that can be used to underpin a dataset, removing dependencies and broadening your ability to deliver the highest performance at the lowest cost.

• Reducing the cost of finance through the elimination of redundant storage mechanisms.

• The ability to integrate client or partnerdeveloped IP or applications more easily.

Data fabric is a strategic technology approach that can mean big benefits to CFOs and their teams as they work to ensure data is trusted, detailed and generating business insights. From increasing flexibility and performance to reducing the cost of finance, this is an important strategic technology that will unlock business value.

Gartner recently estimated that data fabrics have the ability to cut data management efforts by up to 70% and accelerate time to value. This has massive implications for finance departments. From limiting the need to build out point to point integrations between systems to the reduction of repetitive tasks like profiling datasets, discovering and aligning new data sources and addressing ongoing integration issues –finance can reduce time to value.