Enterprise-grade file data storage has been around for decades, and in many organizations is a critical function as unstructured data becomes more important to the business. This importance is growing as organizations explore the potential of technologies such as AI. Yet, a combination of exploding data volumes, storage fragmentation, and fast-evolving application demands means managing file storage at scale is an increasingly challenging exercise.

According to research from TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, more than four in five organizations experience data management challenges associated with on-premises file storage environments.¹ Among other things, IT staff struggle to identify the right data set in a timely manner, automate and manage data services, and manage, place, and optimize file data, both between disparate systems and between tiers within single systems (see Figure 1).²

The repercussions of these challenges can be profound in terms of cost and overall business performance. Adding latency through manually intensive operations such as finding the right data and putting it in the right place means tasks take longer to complete, which can affect both technical and business service-level agreements (SLAs). These challenges are amplified as pressure on applications and the business to react quickly to ever-changing demands becomes an imperative.

Meanwhile, optimization challenges lead to resource inefficiency. Having low-value data residing on high-performance (and high cost) media is wasteful, while high-value data on low-performance media can have deleterious performance effects. And a lack of automation overall generates additional overhead on already overburdened IT staff—a situation that can lead to low morale and even potentially costly errors.

And there’s a final, crucial consideration that shows that the imperative to modernize has never been stronger. Unstructured data is a key ingredient driving next-generation artificial intelligence applications such as generative AI. As such, IT and business leaders increasingly recognize that to build effective data pipelines for AI they need to have a modern, functioning on-premises file storage environment. Unfortunately, the ease of use, infinite scale and pay-as-you-go pricing that has come to define cloud-based file storage services has yet to be replicated inside the typical enterprise.

^1. Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Navigating the Cloud and AI Revolution: The State of Enterprise Storage and HCI, March 2024.

^2. Ibid.