Smart data fabrics: The emerging architectural approach that is revolutionising data and analytics initiatives

Within financial institutions, digital transformation agendas are currently widening their focus from solving specific or individual business problems to looking at enterprise-wide initiatives. The aim is to gain a competitive edge, deliver more value to customers, reduce risk and respond more quickly to business needs. With this, finding ways to leverage data to gain insights and inform decision-making is now the top priority. This is, however, challenging because overly complex data infrastructures that rely on a disjointed set of technologies for data management, semantic layers, data pipeline, data integration and analytics are leaving financial institutions unable to obtain data fast enough and in a way that is easy to interpret and share to drive their organisation forward. Many are also struggling to deploy and gain value from much-needed advanced technologies. This paper, supported by research conducted by WBR Insights and sponsored by InterSystems, examines the current data challenges being experienced within the sector and the reasons behind them. It also gives insight into the emergence of next-generation approaches to data management, namely smart data fabrics, which are being considered as a long-term solution to these wide-ranging challenges.