InfoWorld: What is a Data Mesh? Orion’s Data & Analytics Leader Explains

The following is an excerpt from an article published in InfoWorld, featuring quotes from Orion’s Global Head of Data & Analytics, Ahsan Farooqi. 

Understanding the differences between data mesh, data fabric, and data virtualization can help organizations turn scattered data into a strategic advantage. 

Organizations are getting serious about extracting value from the data they produce and collect, even when that data is spread out across multiple clouds, data centers, and silos. Three terms you might hear when learning techniques for this are data mesh, data fabric, and data virtualization. The three concepts might even seem to overlap when you first encounter them. But what distinctions exist among them? 

What is Data Mesh?

“Data mesh is a decentralized model for data, where domain experts like product engineers or LLM specialists control and manage their own data,” says Ahsan Farooqi, global head of data and analytics, Orion Innovation. While data mesh is tied to certain underlying technologies, it’s really a shift in thinking more than anything else. In an organization that has embraced data mesh architecture, domain-specific data is treated as a product owned by the teams relevant to those domains. “Data mesh empowers teams and treats data as a strategic asset,” Farooqi says.

Data mesh arises from the concept of domain-driven design, which in turn informed the idea of microservices-based architectures. You can think of data mesh like a microservices-based architecture for data: Data under a specific domain is owned by the appropriate teams, who use APIs or other techniques to make that data available to potential consumers.

Read the full article at InfoWorld.com.