If a data product is meant to democratize data, then it should be as relevant to a centralized data fabric, or data hub, as it is to a federated data mesh.
Table of Contents
What are Data Products in Terms of Data Mesh?
What is Data Mesh in Terms of Data Products?
Are Data Products Only Relevant for Data Mesh?
How Data Product Platform Future-Proofs Your Data Architecture
What are Data Products in Terms of Data Mesh?
The concept of data-as-a-product is a core principle of data mesh. It suggests that for a distributed data platform to be successful, domain data teams must apply product thinking to the datasets they deliver – considering their data assets as their products, and the rest of the organization's data consumers, as their customers.
A data product is a reusable data asset, engineered to deliver a trusted dataset, for a specific purpose. It integrates data from relevant source systems, processes the data, ensures that it’s compliant, and makes it instantly accessible to anyone with the right credentials.
A data product shields data consumers from the underlying complexities of the data sources, decoupling the dataset from its systems, making it discoverable and accessible as an asset. It generally corresponds to one or more business entities (such as customers, suppliers, or orders) and is made up of metadata and dataset instances.
What is Data Mesh in Terms of Data Products?
Data mesh is founded on 4 key principles:
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Data as a product, where data products – comprised of clean, fresh, and complete data – are delivered to any data consumer, anytime, anywhere, based on permissions and roles
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Business domain-driven data ownership, which reduces the reliance on centralized data teams (often including data engineers and data scientists)
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Instant access to data, enabled by new levels of abstraction and automation – designed to share relevant data cross-functionally, on demand
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Distributed data governance, where each domain governs its own data products, but is reliant on central control of data masking, and other security and compliance measures
In a data mesh, every business domain retains control over all aspects of its data products for both analytical and operational use cases – in terms of quality, freshness, and compliance – and is responsible for sharing them with other domains (departments in the enterprise).
Are Data Products Only Relevant for Data Mesh?
The answer should be, “No”.
If a data product is a reusable data asset that democratizes trusted data across a company, then it should be as relevant to a centralized data fabric architecture, or data hub architecture, as it is to a federated data mesh architecture.
Companies should be able to reap the benefits of data products, regardless of their data architecture, and move from one architecture to the next, while leveraging their data products.
How Data Product Platform Future-Proofs Your Data Architecture
Data Product Platform manages thousands of concurrent data products that continually sync, transform, mask, and serve trusted data through millions of Micro-Databases™ – delivering a 360-degree, holistic view of any business entity to any data consumer in real time.
The platform future-proofs your data architecture because it can be deployed in your architecture of choice: federated data mesh, centralized data fabric, or multi-domain data hub.
In other words, you can look at data product platform as an insurance policy for your data architecture.
