Becoming a data-driven enterprise means taking data out of the sandbox of the information technology team and weaving it into daily business operations. It’s not an easy task. By its nature data is a distributed beast, and businesses have to create a robust, replicable and secure management system that spans a hybrid environment from the data center to the edge.

One way to do that is through a data mesh, described by Kirk Borne (pictured), principal data scientist and executive advisor at Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., as “a unified way of thinking about all your data.”

“When I think of [data] mesh, I think of it like weaving on a loom,” Borne said. “You do all that cross layering of the different threads, and so different use cases in different applications in different techniques can make use of this one fabric no matter where it is in the business.”

Borne spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE Ezmeral//Analytics Unleashed event. They discussed the challenges of deploying enterprise-wide data strategies and how a data fabric abstracts away the complexities of data analysis. (* Disclosure below.)

The modern enterprise is self-driving

The goal of the modern enterprise should be to become “self-driving,” according to Borne, who explains that the idea is modeled after autonomous vehicles that have to make instant decisions from real-time data input to safely operate on the road.

“A decision is always based upon a prediction about outcomes, and you want to optimize that outcome. So, both predictive and prescriptive analytics need to happen in this same stream of data and not statically afterward,” Borne stated. “That self-driving enterprise is enabled by having access to data wherever and whenever you need it, and that’s what that data fabric and data mesh provides.”

A data fabric that abstracts away the complexity of containers to simplify application and workload management anywhere from on-premises to the edge is how Vellante describes Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s Ezmeral container platform.

“You’re abstracting that complexity away and there’s a metadata layer that understands whether it’s on-prem or in the public cloud or across clouds, or at the edge, where are the best places to process that data, what makes sense, does it make sense to move it or not,” Vellante said.

That abstraction makes it empowering for the entire organization, according to Borne.

“We like to talk a lot about data democratization and analytics democratization. This really gives power to every person in the organization to do things without becoming an IT expert,” he concluded.

Watch Vellante and Borne’s complete conversation on the HPE Ezmeral portfolio and data analytics in today’s enterprise below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Ezmeral//Analytics Unleashed event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the HPE Ezmeral\\Analytics Unleashed event. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Kirk Borne