The need for data fabric
As Cloudera CMO David Moxey outlined in his blog, we live in a hybrid data world. Data is growing and continues to accelerate its growth. It is changing in makeup and appearing in ever more places. Driving insight and value from it all is as much of an opportunity as it is a challenge. As a result, it’s getting progressively more complex for businesses to access, use, and create value from it.
Before you can capitalize on your data you need to know what you have, how you can use it in a safe and compliant manner, and how to make it available to the business. What used to be bespoke and complex enterprise data integration has evolved into a modern data architecture that orchestrates all the disparate data sources intelligently and securely, even in a self-service manner: a data fabric.
Cloudera data fabric and analyst acclaim
Data fabrics are one of the more mature modern data architectures. Forrester Research identified the paradigm and coined the term in 2006. Since then, they have conducted regular market analyses and rankings of vendors. Their most recent evaluation, Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Fabric, Q2 2022, came out on June 23, 2022 and ranked Cloudera as a strong performer. Forrester ranked Cloudera at the same level in their two previous Wave reports on this topic (2020 and 2018).
We are proud to be included as one of the top six scoring vendors in the current offering category. Especially since Cloudera’s platform can be deployed not only as a data fabric; it is capable of end-to-end multi-functional analytics. Since our inception, we have helped customers address their data management challenges in a scalable, flexible, and agile manner—even before data fabric became a term. We believe our ranking in this Forrester Wave reflects the breadth of use cases our customers implement with our platform, deployed as a unified data fabric. And because a data fabric does not exist in isolation as a stand-alone solution, the Forrester report also recognizes our partner ecosystem, citing it as our strategic advantage and a result of Cloudera’s long presence in the data platform market. A broad partner ecosystem is crucial to help our customers solve data management and access challenges for all use cases and get value faster.
Move beyond a fabric
When it comes to managing data at scale, dealing with new and varied data sources in a hybrid landscape, understanding data and governing it consistently in line with regulation, and making data available to end users fast, in a self-service manner for any and all use cases, a data fabric deployment is a tremendous asset. However, just like a better data warehouse or snazzier data science tool alone won’t solve all business challenges, a strong data fabric alone is not enough to help organizations drive more value and insight from their data faster.
Where a data fabric is perfect for preparing and managing data at scale, other architectures and paradigms are required to solve the challenges of complexity, cost, and overheads that come into play when driving value and insight from data ever faster. Data lakehouses and meshes have emerged to deliver frameworks and approaches addressing these challenges. Together, they provide a (more complete) approach to becoming data driven. Again, Cloudera customers have and are using our platform to implement these architectures today. But here is the kicker: they use the same, unified hybrid data platform to do so.
Cloudera’s hybrid data platform uniquely provides the building blocks to deploy all modern data architectures. Although technology alone is not enough to deploy any architecture (there is a good deal of process involved too), it is a tremendous benefit to have a single platform that meets the requirements of all architectures. No need to train staff to use, manage, and administer multiple systems; no need to replicate key aspects like security and governance across various frameworks in different infrastructures; no need to compromise either time to value or IT control.
Next steps
Cloudera provides the technological piece of the solution to support all current modern data architectures. And while the future undoubtedly holds more data challenges and yet-to-be-defined architectural approaches, the open basis of our platform will make sure that our customers are ready for whatever comes next.
Our whitepapers give you in-depth insight into how Cloudera Data Platform can help you accelerate your data-driven initiatives by implementing data fabrics, data lakehouses, and data meshes. We look forward to speaking with you and helping you make the most of your data.
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