From Data Fabric, Hub and Sphere

SAP introduces Datasphere to simplify data landscapes

SAP plans to introduce the next generation of its data management portfolio with the Datasphere solution. It is designed to give customers easy access to immediately usable data across the entire data landscape. Until now, SAP says, accessing and using data that resides in different systems and locations, such as cloud providers, data providers and on-premises systems, has been a complex challenge. Customers had to extract data from their original storage locations and export it to a central location.

In the process, SAP apparently repeatedly lost important context information that could only be restored with special, ongoing IT projects and manual effort. With Datasphere, this effort is to be a thing of the past. Customers have the ability to design a data fabric architecture for managing business data that quickly delivers meaningful data with business context and logic intact. The term data fabric was defined by analysts at Gartner. SAP Datasphere is available now and is said to be the next generation of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud solution. Data specialists will be able to use it to provide scalable access to business-critical data.

The solution provides services for data integration, data cataloging, semantic modeling, data warehousing, data federation, and data virtualization. This enables data professionals to distribute business-critical data across their organization's data landscape while maintaining business context and logic. Datasphere is built on the Business Technology Platform (BTP), which provides powerful enterprise security capabilities, such as database security, encryption and governance, among others. No additional steps or migrations are required for existing Data Warehouse Cloud customers, allowing them to benefit from Datasphere's new capabilities in their product environment.

As one of the new features, data cataloging enables automatic discovery, management and control of data. And simplified data replication allows data and its ongoing updates to be made available in real time. Furthermore, advanced data modeling ensures that the rich business context information of data from SAP applications is preserved. Additional application integration capabilities that link data and metadata from SAP cloud applications to SAP Datasphere are planned.