The data fabric is an emerging design concept for data management that addresses the challenges of data complexity. It aims to provide an agile enterprise data foundation to support a wide variety of business use cases. The notion of a data fabric is closely tied to DataOps and initiatives for data modernization and digital innovation at large.
A data fabric can be thought of as a tapestry that connects data from multiple locations (edge-core-cloud), types, and sources of data, with methods for accessing that data. For users that are consuming applications and systems alike, it abstracts away the complexities associated with underlying storage, movement, transformation, securing and processing of data.
A data fabric is not a replacement of more traditional data management architectures such as data lakes, data warehouses, data hubs and databases. Rather, a data fabric involves those systems as active participants in a unified approach.