Enterprise Data Fabric and the Impact on a Digital Transformation of Life Sciences
“By 2024, data fabric deployments will quadruple efficiency in data utilization while cutting human-driven data management tasks in half.”[1]
Data Fabric is a hot topic buzzword today. We think of Data Fabric as the way of creating an abstraction from the underlying technology. Allowing the data to be exposed at the top level as business objects that are semantically related. This can be thought of as a weaving together of data from internal silos and external sources that creates a network of information to power the business’ applications, AI, and analytics. The underlying plumbing allows for assembling and integrating data in somewhat intelligent and flexible ways to allow the integration of new data sources and to find the most efficient pipelines to deliver that data.
Data Fabrics includes ML to identify and connect business, technical and operational metadata. They include recommendation engines that help to identify the most efficient data pipelines for delivering new data as well as dynamic semantic modeling and data catalogs to minimize manual processing and enable rapid intelligent characterization of data while supplying coherent graphs for navigation across sources.
The following are some important components that need to be considered with respect to Data Fabric in the life sciences industry:
- Repository Technologies –Repository technologies, ingestion, and curation capabilities will need to keep pace with new and emerging data types, data collection and transmission methods, and the volume and speed at which R&D and real-world data is acquired. There will be a need to leverage a mixture of storage modalities (e.g., traditional data warehouses, marts, multi-modal hubs) to handle the breadth of data and query patterns, while accommodating specialty scientific, technology and emerging standards (e.g., semantics, graph DBs, blockchain for genomes and eHR)
- Ingestion Archetypes – Establishing ingestion archetypes (e.g., batch, streaming, data virtualization, ETL, etc.), underpinned by machine learning technologies to enable rapid data characterization and minimize the need for traditional labor-intensive model, map and move approaches. Using graph technology and semantic linked data models to explicitly encode context with the data, enabling inferential queries, while minimizing the technical debt that is typically incurred when new data sources are identified (industry leaders typically use graph databases to accomplish)
- Data Federation – Defining a data federation strategy, outlining when data will be moved to controlled environments, cloud or otherwise, or when to federate or keep data at the source. Leveraging data virtualization capabilities to access and integrate data at the source when dictated by business, regulatory, or technical requirements; virtualization services provide agility for exploration of data and relationships.
- Data Marketplaces – Catalogs power search and discovery through Google-like interfaces, enabling contextual navigation and retrieval (e.g., disease and molecular context). Data are automatically tagged, classified, cataloged, and integrated into dynamic data models, helping users to make sense of large or complex sets of data.
What It Means to You
Emerging technologies will play an important role in the future of the life sciences industry and Enterprise Data Fabric will make a significant impact. It is therefore critical to understand what Data Fabric is and how it can be leveraged in your business.
In this blog we discussed:
- What an Enterprise Data Fabric is.
- Why it’s important.
- Several key components that need to be considered with respect to it.
ResultWorks – An Astrix Business
For over 25 years, Astrix has been a market-leader in delivering innovative solutions through world class people, process, and technology that fundamentally improves scientific outcomes and quality of life everywhere. Founded by scientists to solve the unique challenges life sciences and other science-based business face, Astrix offers a growing array of strategic, technical, and staffing services designed to deliver value to clients across their organizations.
ResultWorks, an Astrix business, achieves success for our clients through skilled facilitation and exceptional management leadership across Life Science domains from Research, Non-Clinical & Clinical Development, Regulatory Affairs, to Safety, Manufacturing, and Pharmacovigilance. To learn more about how ResultWorks enables biopharmaceutical leaders’ success, visit www.resultworksllc.com.
To learn the latest about how Astrix is transforming the way science-based business succeed today, visit www.astrixinc.com.
