BUILD A MODERN DATA MESH, NOT A DATA MESS

Before we dig into what data mesh means, it is important to be aware that data has swiftly become one of the most relevant assets for businesses in the modern world. Companies use data to improve decision-making, gain insights into their customers’ habits and preferences, and generate and sustain growth. Nonetheless, as the amount, variety, and pace of data continue to increase at a furious pace, a traditional data management approach will still see your company struggling to keep up. Enter data mesh, a modern approach to data management that strengthens businesses with the capacity to build a scalable, decentralized, and efficient data ecosystem.

What is data mesh and how does it work?

Data mesh is an up-to-date data management approach that focuses on domain-oriented decentralization, where multiple teams and organization branches take responsibility for their own data. In a traditional data management approach, data is often centralized, managed by an individual team, and accessed by others through an API or data warehouse. On the other hand, data mesh involves a decentralized approach, where multiple teams or domains are responsible for their own data, turning it into a product that other teams can consume according to their needs. This approach will undoubtedly reduce data fragmentation, promote data quality, and enhance the autonomy of different teams.

Thus, from a more practical point of view, data mesh abides by four key principles:

Domain-oriented decentralization:

Cross-functional teams take responsibility for and ownership of their own data and manage it as a product to be consumed or utilized by others.

Data as a product:

Data is treated as a product to be consumed by other teams or domains. This changes the philosophy and way of thinking about analytical data since everything rests on the idea that all data has other consumers beyond the domain and that each team is responsible for satisfying the needs of other domains.

Self-serve data platform:

A platform that provides tools, systems, and services that enable teams to build, maintain, manage, access, and consume data products.

Federated governance:

A governance model that provides guardrails and standards to assure that all data products are aligned with the overall business objectives, organizational rules, and global regulations.

Basically, data mesh functions by breaking down data silos, empowering different teams to make sustained decisions based on their specific data, and allowing them to share their data products with other teams or branches across the organization. It is an approach that can considerably strengthen data quality, reduce data duplication, increase data availability, and upgrade the efficiency and effectiveness of data management.

Data Mesh Architecture

A data mesh architecture aims to provide a framework for implementing a data mesh approach. It consists of multiple premises that connect and work closely to create a new and innovative data ecosystem. These premises include:

Data Products:

Data products are the units of data mesh representing a domain-specific data set. They can be anything from raw data to more complex data sets and are expected to be designed and managed to serve an organization-specific usage.

Data Domains:

Each cross-functional team that takes responsibility for creating and managing its data products. These teams are structured and organized around a specific organizational domain, such as sales, marketing, or finance. The teams have ownership over their data products and must ensure the overall quality, governance, and compliance of their data.

Data Platform:

A self-serve data platform provides systems, tools, and services for managing data products and their accessibility. The data platform should be designed to account for the needs of individual teams and offer a normalized approach to data creation, transformation, storage, and consumption. The platform should also provide governance and compliance tools to make sure that all data products are aligned with the organization’s objectives and comply with both global and industry-specific regulatory requirements.

Data Infrastructure:

The elemental technology infrastructure that supports the data mesh ecosystem. This includes storage systems, computing resources, networking, and security. It is crucial that this data infrastructure is designed adequately to allow for easy scalability, resilience, and cost-effectiveness.

Hence, the data mesh architecture brings to the table a decentralized approach to data management, where data is managed at the domain level, and individual teams are responsible for their data products. When done and implemented correctly, this approach can boost the organization’s data strategy and create an architectural structure around the processes that are built from and for the people, maximizing everyone’s contribution to the data environment.

Benefits of Building a Modern Data Mesh

Building a modern and consistent data mesh can offer several benefits to organizations. First and foremost, as seen before, it can improve data quality. By empowering teams to take ownership of their data products, businesses can easily guarantee that their data is accurate, up-to-date, and relevant to the organization. Data mesh also enables and enhances cross-functional collaboration throughout the organization, encouraging teams to analyze and share data products. This can lead to better decision-making and more sustained insights.

Another benefit of data mesh is felt in the agility and autonomy of teams. By taking advantage of a self-serve data platform and federated governance model, businesses can enable teams to move swiftly and make data-driven decisions on a daily basis without having to rely on a centralized data team, which in most cases, can create bottlenecks and delays. This can lead to an acceleration of innovation and a faster time-to-market.

Data mesh also provides businesses with the possibility to scale their data infrastructure more efficiently. By breaking down data into domain-specific data products, businesses can avoid the pitfalls of traditional data architectures that are difficult and expensive to scale. Instead, teams will focus on creating smaller, more manageable data products that can be scaled up or down as the organization sees fit.

Finally, data mesh will have a considerable positive impact on compliance and security. By providing a standardized approach to data governance and compliance, businesses can ensure that their data products match regulatory requirements and industry standards. Additionally, a significant decrease in the risk of data breaches and other security issues will also be observed.

Steps to Building a Modern Data Mesh

Now that we have covered the importance of having a modern data mesh in an organization, it is time to center our attention on how to do it. To put it briefly, in order to build a modern data mesh, businesses should bear in mind the following steps:

Identify domains and teams:

Sort out and identify the different domains and cross-functional teams across the organization that will be responsible for creating, maintaining, and managing data products.

Define data products:

Define the data products that each team will make available and manage, as well as their complexity, volume, and quality requirements.

Build self-serve data platform:

Build a platform that gives teams the ability to manage their own data products, including data ingestion, analysis, transformation, storage, and consumption.

Implement federated governance and align with business objectives:

Adopt a model that provides standardization all across the organization, ensuring that data products are consistent with the overall objectives or long-term strategies and that they provide value to the organization.

Enable data sharing:

Promote data sharing between teams with a uniform approach to data exchange and access.

Monitor and measure:

Monitoring and measuring the performance and effectiveness of the data mesh approach is crucial to its success. This should also include monitoring and evaluating data quality and overall data availability.

Conclusion

To sum up, data mesh is a modern approach to managing data that allows companies to establish a flexible, decentralized, and effective data infrastructure. This approach allows teams to take responsibility for their data products and utilize a self-service data platform, which can enhance data accuracy, minimize data silos, and boost individual teams’ agility, independence, and ownership. By adhering to the guidelines presented in this article, organizations can build a cutting-edge data mesh and evade the confusion due to a chaotic data environment.