Data Mesh — Improve Trust Cryptographically

In cryptography we trust

Being able to share, consume and use data throughout an enterprise with almost no technical difficulties while ensuring data quality, data ownership and data consistency is a sought after goal by many enterprises both small and large. The introduction of the data mesh concept makes this goal more of a reality.

The concept of the data mesh revolves around the fact that data is perceived as a product and is shared in a standardised manner throughout an organisation in a mesh structure. Data should be accessible and consumable in a standardised manner which complies with enterprise (or industry) wide standards for both the technical implementation as well as the definition of the data itself.

Data mesh is a sociotechnical approach to build a decentralised data architecture by leveraging a domain-oriented, self-serve design (in a software development perspective), and borrows Eric Evans’ theory of domain-driven design and Manuel Pais’ and Matthew Skelton’s theory of team topologies. The main proposition is scaling analytical data by domain-oriented decentralization. With data mesh, the responsibility for analytical data is shifted from the central data team to the domain teams, supported by a data platform team that provides a domain-agnostic data platform.

Trust is one of the keywords

Within the concept of the data mesh a domain will be responsible for the creation of their data products. With that responsibility come “-ilities” such as quality, consistency, accuracy, availability and security.

Within the concept of a data mesh those -ilities are the responsibility of the domain that provides the data product, as the consuming party you will have to put trust into the team responsible for this domain.

On the other hand, the domain that provides the data product has to put trust in the consuming parties that they will handle the data correctly, adhere to the “store data only once” and “one data owner” concepts. In addition to that the provider of the data product will have to trust the consuming party that they safeguard the credentials needed to access the data in the right and proper manner to prevent the loss of credentials and potential unauthorized access to a data product.