What is a Data Mesh?
Data mesh is a modern decentralized (or federated) architectural approach that allows organizations to make more timely and trusted data-driven decisions by empowering domain teams to create, organize, and maintain trusted data products for data users.
Critical requirements of data mesh include self-service access to all critical data by domain experts, federated decentralized data governance, and a user-friendly interface to discover, understand, and access approved data products.
Why is a Data Mesh Important?
Data access in complex environments can be slow, hindering innovation and efficiency - sometimes taking days or weeks to receive the needed data. Domain experts cannot quickly respond to user’s requests for timely data products. And by the time the data is available, it is often outdated – resulting in lower confidence in the insights or outcomes anticipated. Data mesh architectures are implemented to empower domain teams to quickly and confidently make more timely data-driven decisions.
Lack of a centralized inventory of existing data products leads to inefficiencies for both domain experts who may not know what other data assets have been created, and data users who spend excessive time identifying if a needed data asset or product exists and is it fit for purpose. The absence of details such as lineage, schema, and other metadata results in inconsistent and unreliable business insights and missed opportunities for innovation, operational improvements, or risk reduction. A key pillar of a data mesh is the capability to easily discover, understand, and self-serve data products.
Decentralized data requires even more stringent data governance to mitigate risks related to privacy, security, and data policies. Without robust data governance, responsibilities for data asset and product maintenance are unclear, leading to non-compliance, duplicated efforts, poor adoption, and diminished trust in data products in a data mesh. Data mesh requires domain owners to take responsibility for implementing policies that ensure privacy and security – but are balanced with the autonomy needed to empower data users to quickly understand if data products are fit for purpose.
What are the Benefits of a Data Mesh?
Benefits of a data mesh include faster delivery of data products for more timely and trusted business decisions. Empowering domain experts with the ability to access critical data on-demand enhances speed to delivery of data requests. Operational efficiency and agility are improved as data products can evolve at the domain level as data is observed for changes that may impact existing assets so that domain owners can create or improve high-value data products for their unique use cases.
Accelerated discovery, understanding and the ability to self-serve data products are also benefits. With a user-friendly inventory of existing data products, users will save valuable time searching for existing products or repeating unnecessary new requests and deriving faster time to insights. Domain owners will know if the data product already exists to avoid duplication and wasted efforts.
A high level of data governance maturity is a foundational piece in a data mesh strategy. By ensuring visibility and auditability at the domain level, organizations decrease risk and compliance violations. Risks are mitigated when there is clear visibility into which data products are associated with specific policies, privacy, security, and regulatory requirements.
Data governance also increases overall data literacy by sharing a unified view of data meaning, ownership, accountability, quality, rules, and metrics, and business impact – all leading to more informed, confident, and trusted data-driven decisions.
How Precisely Can Help?
Empower domain experts to respond quickly to data requests with self-service access to critical domain data through the Precisely Data Integrity Suite Data Integration service. Improve the agility and confidence in domain insights and outcomes with more real-time and trusted data products - and proactively be alerted to data changes that may impact existing data products through the Data Observability service that continuously profiles and monitors your data using machine learning intelligence.
Domain experts can improve the accuracy, consistency, and context of data products by leveraging interoperable Data Integrity Suite services such as Data Quality, Geo Addressing, Data Enrichment, and Spatial Analytics in their data mesh environment.
Enable domain experts and users to easily find and understand data products via catalog card views of data products through the user-friendly Precisely Data Integrity Suite Data Catalog. Coupled with the Data Governance service that delivers additional business metadata, users are empowered to request access or collaborate on data products that are relevant, trusted, and current for more immediate data-driven outcomes.
Reduce risk and increase data literacy with the Precisely Data Integrity Suite’s Data Governance service to ensure oversight of data privacy and security, while establishing clear visibility into meaning, ownership, and accountability around data access, policies, quality, and business metadata. The ultimate benefit - ensuring data products are accurate, consistent, and being used responsibly.