Book excerpt: Data mesh increases data access and value

Whether an organization needs data is no longer up for debate. Now, knowing how to make it useable and accessible is the hurdle to clear.

While data warehouses and lakes help centralize data, data mesh decentralizes data and widens access. It provides a new direction for organizations to speed up data accessibility throughout their organization.

Zhamak Dehghani explains what data mesh is, why an organization may want it, how to design its architecture and how to install it in Data Mesh: Delivering Data-Driven Value at Scale. The book's chapters cover the principles of data mesh, why data mesh should be considered, how to build its architecture, how to determine if an organization is ready for it and how to adopt it.

Dehghani is the creator of the data mesh concept, coining the term in 2019 after seeing large organizations fail to extract data value despite investing in various technologies.

"Observing their struggles to scale data management solutions and organization to meet their ambitious data aspirations led to questioning the decades-old assumptions in how we get value from data," Dehghani wrote. "We collect it, we centrally store it, we put a data team in charge of it, and then we unleash it on a diverse set of users and use cases. These assumptions had to be revisited."

Here is an excerpt from chapter 15, "Strategy and Execution," outlining whether an organization should adopt data mesh. Dehghani discusses eight criteria organizations should use to determine if they should install data mesh into data operations.

Excerpted with the permission of the publisher from Data Mesh: Delivering Data-Driven Value at Scale by Zhamak Dehghani. Copyright 2022 by O'Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and e-books are sold.