It’s a given in this digital age that enterprise data—and unstructured file data in particular—continues to grow. It’s also clear that, for many, this data continues to be in more places—the modern organization is typically highly distributed. And if the organization is highly distributed, so is its data.
This ‘data entropy’ creates challenges around cost effectively and securely storing, protecting, and accessing this data, especially for unstructured data sets that might be highly collaborative in nature. Indeed, research from Enterprise Strategy Group found that locating the right data set and making it accessible in a timely fashion was the top file storage-related data challenge that organizations are facing.1 Number two on that list are challenges associated with the management, optimization, and placement of data across separate locations.
For many, these challenges are becoming more profound. Understanding and managing large unstructured data volumes across many locations and users is complex, and this complexity can drive up costs—both physical storage costs but also management overhead, such as service desk costs, as data volumes, locations, and users grow. There are also potentially significant risks associated with such data sets; files often contain highly sensitive data—customer data, personally identifiable information, financial information, or intellectual property—that could have major business impacts if it fell into the wrong hands—either by malicious or accidental means.
A key issue is that storage and data management tools have not kept pace with the realities of an accelerating file data environment. Enterprise Strategy Group’s research also identified a lack of automation in file data management as a major challenge in this respect. As organizations continue to adopt new and emerging technologies—particularly advanced AI use cases that are built on unstructured data sets—we can expect they will seek more powerful capabilities that let them not only manage their growing volumes of file data with more intelligence and at a granular level, but also by using automation to streamline the process.
1. Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Navigating the Cloud and AI Revolution: The State of Enterprise Storage and HCI, March 2024.