GigaOm Radar for Unstructured Data Management: Business-Focused Solutionsv3.01

1. Summary

Managing storage capacity with efficiency has become more accessible and more reasonably priced, thanks to scale-out storage systems for files and objects. At the same time, the cloud offers the flexibility to expand the number of options available in terms of performance, capacity, and cold data archiving. The proliferation of data silos is an issue, though, and one that’s accelerating alarmingly because of new multicloud IT strategies and edge computing.

The flexibility and scalability provided by public clouds also come at a price. In this period of financial turmoil and uncertainty, some organizations are actively seeking cost-reduction opportunities: cloud-first initiatives are being reevaluated, and data repatriation projects are becoming commonplace across multiple verticals. Those projects require careful planning and execution and can become very costly without a prior analysis of the existing and anticipated data footprint.

Complexity also impacts internal policy and regulatory compliance; strict regulations akin to GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) are being adopted worldwide, making analysis and classification more difficult without the help of an unstructured data management solution. Furthermore, data sovereignty regulations impose restrictions on physical data location and data flows, requiring organizations to adequately segment access to resources by location and identify and geo-fence impacted data sets. Solutions that support these regulatory frameworks and are capable of handling data privacy requests–like Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs), identifying and classifying personally identifiable information (PII), or even taking further action with the right to be forgotten (RtbF) and the right of erasure (RoE) requests–can radically simplify compliance operations.

Those two business imperatives—repatriation projects and regulatory compliance—increase the need for solutions that can seamlessly handle data movement at scale automatically, with minimal oversight, ideally based on a policy engine.

We are coming to a point where storing data safely and for a long period of time does not actually bring any benefit to an organization, and it can quickly become a liability. However, with the right processes and tools, it’s now possible to take control of data and exploit its hidden value, transforming it from a liability to an asset.

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 building and developing a data management strategy for unstructured data, including better security and compliance, improved end-user services, reduced costs, and data reusability. The right data management strategy enables organizations to mitigate risk and make the most of opportunities.

This GigaOm Radar report highlights key unstructured data management vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating Unstructured Data Management Solutions,” we describe in more detail the key features and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.