65% of IT Leaders Investing in Unstructured Data Analytics

Komprise, Inc. announces the results of its second annual industry survey, 2022 Unstructured Data Management Report.

A key takeaway is the shift from driving storage efficiencies to delivering data services in the cloud including the ability to leverage file and object data in cloud analytics tools for new value and competitive gain.
 
The report examines unstructured data management challenges and opportunities in enterprise IT organizations. Participants reported on topics from how much data they are managing to cloud data priorities and future approaches to unstructured data management.
 
According to the report, enterprises are storing more data than ever: more than 50% are managing 5PB or more of data, compared with less than 40% in the 2021 survey, and most are spending more than 30% of the IT budget on storage and backups.

As a result, IT leaders are feeling pressure to manage data more granularly and cost-effectively; the survey shows that cloud file storage, followed closely by cloud object storage, are top areas of investment. Finally, the report found emerging use cases for unstructured data management as requirements grow beyond cost savings and into data lifecycle management, compliance and generating business value from data.
 
Highlights of the Report:

Unstructured Data Management Challenges and Trends:

• More than 50% of organizations are managing 5PB or more of data, compared with less than 40% in 2021.
• Nearly 68% are spending more than 30% of their IT budget on storage, backups and disaster recovery.
• Cloud storage predominates: Nearly half (47%) will invest in cloud NAS, followed by cloud object storage (43%).
• On-premises only storage environments decreased from 20% to 11.9%.
• The largest obstacle to unstructured data management (42%) is moving data without disrupting users and applications.
   
  

Unstructured Data Management Goals and Plans:

• A majority (65%) of organizations plan to or are already investing in delivering unstructured data to their new analytics/big data platforms.
• The top goal (43%) is to adopt new storage and cloud technologies without incurring extra licensing penalties and costs.
• After cutting costs, the 2nd highest expected benefit of cloud data migrations is to improve self-service for end users and departments (43%).
• The leading new approach to unstructured data management is the ability to initiate and execute data workflows (43%).
• Expanding use cases for unstructured data management include protecting sensitive data (63%) followed by allowing users to search and run analytics (41%) and enabling data deletion policies (35%).
   
  

“After cutting costs, IT leaders are motivated to improve self-service for end users and departments by moving more data to the cloud,” said Krishna Subramanian, co-founder, COO and president. “In unstructured data management, self-service typically refers to the ability for authorized users outside of storage disciplines to easily search, tag, enrich and move data to new tools and services through automation. This delivers faster time to value for users looking to leverage vast unstructured data stores for new insights and revenue-generating activities, by using cloud data lakes and analytics platforms.“
 
The 2022 Unstructured Data Management Report summarizes the responses of 300 enterprise storage IT decision makers at companies with more than 1,000 employees in USA and UK. All respondents are IT director level or above.