Table of Contents
- Summary
- About the GigaOm Radar
- Market Categories and Deployment Types
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Roundup/Overview
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Exponential data growth is no longer news, with unstructured data already counting 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 and reasonably less expensive thanks to scale-out storage systems for files and objects. At the same time, the cloud offers the opportunity even 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 a trend that is accelerating alarmingly thanks to multi-cloud IT strategies and edge computing. As we recently discussed in a report (Key Criteria for Evaluating Hybrid Cloud Data Protection), finding a solution to protect data across several infrastructures and environments is still quite challenging.
Moreover, in this multi-cloud scenario, new demanding regulations like GDPR require a different approach. Data protection and management processes are crucial for compliance with ever-changing business requirements, laws, and organization policies.
We are finally coming to a point where storing data safely and for a long time does not bring any benefit to an organization, and it can quickly become a liability. On the contrary, with the right processes and tools, it is now possible to take control of data and exploit its hidden value, 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 a few years ago.
With the right unstructured data management solutions, it is possible to understand what data is stored in the storage systems, no matter how complex and dispersed it is, and to build a strategy to intervene on costs, while increasing the return on investment for data storage.
Depending on the approach chosen by the user, there are several potential benefits in 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 exploit opportunities.