Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and Deployment Types
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Exponential data growth is no longer news, with unstructured data already accounting for 80% to 90% of the total data stored in enterprise storage systems. Human-generated data is now joined by machine-generated data that is growing even more quickly and needs infrastructures with different characteristics.
Managing storage capacity with efficiency has become more accessible, less expensive, and reasonably priced, thanks to scale-out storage systems for files and objects. At the same time, the cloud offers the opportunity to expand the number of options available in terms of performance, capacity, and cold data archiving. The proliferation of data silos presents an issue, though, and it’s a trend that is accelerating alarmingly because of new multicloud IT strategies and edge computing.
Moreover, in this multicloud scenario, new demanding regulations like GDPR, CCPA, PIPL, and others require a different approach. Data protection and management processes are crucial for compliance with ever-changing business requirements, laws, and organization policies.
Furthermore, data sovereignty regulations impose restrictions on physical location of data and data flows, requiring organizations to adequately segment access to resources by location, and identify and geo-fence impacted datasets. Solutions that support these regulatory frameworks and are capable of handling data privacy requests—such as Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs), identifying and classifying personally identifiable information (PII), or even taking further action with right to be forgotten (RtbF) and right of erasure (RoE) requests—can radically simplify compliance operations.
We’re coming to a point where it may seem that storing data safely and for a long time does not benefit an organization and can quickly become a liability.
On the other hand, with the right processes and tools, businesses can do more with their data than ever before, mining it for hidden insights and capturing incredible value in the process, transforming it from a liability into an asset. Examples of this transformation are now common across all industries, with enterprises of all sizes reusing old data for new purposes, thanks to technologies and computing power that weren’t available only a few years ago.
With the right unstructured data management solutions, it’s possible to:
- Understand what data is stored in the storage systems, no matter how complex and dispersed.
- Build a strategy to intervene on costs while increasing the return on investment (ROI) for data storage.
Depending on the approach chosen by the user, there are several potential benefits to be derived from building and developing a data management strategy for unstructured data, including better security and compliance, improved services for end-users, cost reduction, and data reusability. The right data management strategy enables organizations to mitigate risk and make the most of opportunities.