Unstructured Data Management Trends for 2025
Welcome to the latest edition of the Komprise Intelligent Data Management newsletter! We cover new ways for IT managers to be more productive managing enterprise data and storage to dealing with ever-changing compliance issues, working with departments on data strategies and understanding the new requirements for data management and delivering AI-ready data. Learn more about Komprise, a SaaS solution for unstructured data management and mobility here and follow us on LinkedIn.
This month’s newsletter covers what we see on the horizon for IT in 2025 when it comes to managing unstructured data in the enterprise. We discuss:
?
1.??? IT complexity and best of breed reign.?
Entering 2025, enterprise IT leaders might be facing their biggest conundrum in years if not decades. While there is money to spend – many analyst firms predict healthy IT and cloud budgets next year – there are too many things to focus on and IT must proceed with caution. To compare, the years 2020 and 2021 revolved around two significant and universal mandates: supporting WFH and moving to digital-first or digital-only business models. Today, business leaders have been hearing the steady drumbeat of AI for at least two years now. Yet many organizations aren’t prepared. AI requires significant investment across infrastructure, tools, processes, education and training. Meanwhile they must address rising ransomware threats, reduce technical debt, optimize hybrid cloud strategies and implement new platforms for data management, data security and AI. While large incumbent vendors will attempt to convince IT leaders that they can do it all, there are high risks in this approach.
Top Takeaway: Leaders will lean on a best-of-breed approach for better cost economics and advanced capabilities – despite the greater IT management complexities this will bring.??
??
2.??? Hybrid cloud persists, mandating deep intelligence on data and costs.?
After years of ping-ponging between cloud-first strategies, then cloud repatriation and back again, it’s clear that hybrid cloud is here to stay for the foreseeable future. IT leaders have realized that a mix of on-premises, edge and cloud computing is a sensible, risk-averse strategy to satisfy the needs of different workloads and departments. Storage and cloud vendors will adapt to this reality while IT will need intelligence on their data assets so they can move data into the optimal storage over its lifecycle. Optimizing a hybrid cloud storage environment will be a moving target dependent upon real-time analytics on data types, growth and access patterns and the flexibility to move data to secondary or cloud storage tiers as needed. Storage professionals can amp up their career by adopting an analytics mindset in everything they do.?
Top Takeaway:? Continual analytics on data in storage—its costs, value and usage--will be instrumental to optimize hybrid cloud environments.
?
3.??? Unstructured data management solutions broaden to serve AI data governance and monitoring needs.??
The Komprise 2024 State of Unstructured Data Management report uncovered that IT leaders are prioritizing AI data governance and security as the top future capability for solutions. AI data governance includes protecting data from breaches or misuse, maintaining compliance with industry regulations, managing biases in data, and ensuring that AI does not lead to false, misleading or libelous results. Monitoring and alerting for capacity issues or anomalies, last year’s top pick, remains high again along with analytics and reporting.
Top Takeaway: IT and storage directors will look for unstructured data management solutions that offer automated capabilities to protect, segment and audit sensitive and internal data use in AI.
?
4.??? Systematic data ingestion for AI will be the first data storage mandate.?
AI mania is overwhelming, but so far, enterprise participation has been largely led by employees who are using GenAI tools to assist with daily tasks such as writing, research and basic analysis. AI model training has been primarily the responsibility of specialists, and storage IT has not been involved. But this will change swiftly in the coming year. Business leaders know that if they get left behind in the AI Gold Rush, they may lose market share, customers and relevance. Corporate data will be used with AI for RAG and inferencing, which will constitute 90% of AI investment over time. Everyone touching data and infrastructure will need to understand the risks, help set guardrails and ensure a simple user experience as everyday employees start sending company data to AI.
?
Top Takeaway: Storage IT will need to create systematic, automated ways for users to search across corporate data stores, curate the right data, check for sensitive data and move data to AI with audit reporting.
?
5.??? IT leaders will get creative to deploy AI on a budget.
Many enterprise IT teams are not ready for AI. That’s because it often requires new infrastructure, hard-to-find expertise on building and training learning models, unique governance and security solutions, employee training and more.?
In the 2024 Komprise State of Unstructured Data Management report, only 30% of IT leaders said they will increase the budget for?AI.
Organizations can go to the cloud for a more affordable approach by experimenting with AI services such as pre-trained AI models from AWS, Azure, Google, IBM and other cloud providers. Rather than developing and supporting a customized AI solution, an organization may get the benefits they need from upgrading to the latest version of their enterprise business applications which likely have AI built in—such as from Oracle, Salesforce or SAP. No-code or low-code AI platforms claim to allow non-technical staff to build AI models without extensive coding knowledge. Finally, being as efficient as possible with data storage by continually analyzing and right-placing unstructured data into the most cost-effective storage will free up funds for AI.??
Top Takeaway: IT leaders will align budget to AI according to business priorities. Using a mix of DIY and off-the-shelf AI options with a focus on data management to minimize risks and lower costs will be a popular strategy.
?
领英推荐
6.??? Unstructured data governance processes for AI will mature.
Protecting corporate data from leakage and misuse and preventing unwanted, erroneous results of AI are top of mind for executives today. A lack of agreed-upon standards, guidelines and regulations in North America is making the task more difficult. IT leaders can get started by using data management technology to get visibility on all their unstructured data across storage. This visibility is the starting point to understanding this growing volume of data better so that it can be governed and managed properly for AI. Data classification is another key step in AI data governance, and it involves enriching file metadata with tags to identify sensitive data that cannot be used in AI programs. Metadata enrichment is also available for aiding researchers and data scientists who need to quickly curate data sets for their projects by searching on keywords that identify file contents. With automated processes for data classification, IT can create workflows to continually send protected data sets to secure locations and, separately, send AI-ready data sets to object storage where it can be ingested by AI tools. Automated data workflow orchestration tools will be important for efficiently managing these tasks across petabyte-scale data estates.
Top Takeaway:? AI-ready unstructured data management solutions will deliver a means to understand and classify data, quickly curate the right data sets while identifying and protecting PII, monitor workflows in progress and audit outcomes for risk.?
7.??? No single global namespace will win. ?
Unstructured data is trapped in many places. These silos make it difficult to manage and extract value from it. Many storage vendors are attempting to address the silo issue by saying if customers would only move to their storage vendor and away from other silos, they could have a unified solution with a single global namespace. This is a simplistic assumption that will not come to pass. Customers use a variety of storage vendors and storage architectures because their data has different demands throughout its lifecycle. Furthermore, the last decade has shown us that customers want to remain hybrid and leverage a mix of on-premises and cloud offerings. With Flash prices rising and the introduction of new GPU-optimized storage plus the expansion of capacity storage offerings such as immutable object storage, IT organizations have more options than ever before. Storage-agnostic data management with transparency will be favored over proprietary single-vendor global namespace solutions.?
Top Takeaway:? The answer to the silo problem is not to eliminate silos but, rather, to get a single pane of glass across all silos and be able to move data from file to object and vice-versa while extending the primary namespace.?
?
8.??? Pressure on the grid and the reservoirs will drive green computing.?
North American data center vacancy rates are hitting new lows across major markets while continued worldwide power shortages are inhibiting global data center growth, according to 2024 research from CRBE. With water shortages continuing to plague the American West, IT and business leaders will begin to see significant impacts on the bottom line from the looming energy crisis. These natural constraints will serve as stronger motivators than ever before to adopt green computing and green business strategies. While the carrot hasn’t always worked in the past, the stick of rising prices and power shortages to run facilities and support AI and digital business initiatives will be a wake-up call to many organizations.?
Top Takeaway:? Leading cloud hyperscalers are exploring sustainable data center technologies, paving the way for enterprise IT organizations to follow suit.
?
9.??? Ransomware defense of unstructured data becomes more urgent.??
Traditionally, data protection has focused on mission-critical data because this is the data that needs faster restores. Yet the landscape has changed with unstructured data growing to encompass 90% of all data generated in the last 10 years. The large surface area of petabytes of unstructured data coupled with its widespread use and rapid growth make it highly vulnerable to ransomware attacks. Cyber-criminals can use the unstructured data as a Trojan horse to infect the enterprise. Cost-effectively protecting unstructured data from ransomware will become a critical defense tactic, starting with moving the cold, inactive data to immutable object storage where it cannot be modified.?
Top Takeaway:? Most file data isn’t mission critical–but it could be your weakest link for ransomware attacks. File tiering eliminates cold data from the ransomware attack surface while giving users and applications seamless access.
?
10. Role of storage administrator evolves to embrace security and AI data governance.
Pressing demands on both the data security and AI fronts are changing the roles of storage IT professionals. The job of managing storage has evolved, with technologies now more automated and self-healing, cloud-based and easier to manage. At the same time, there is increasing overlap and interdependency between cybersecurity, data privacy, storage and AI. Storage pros will need to make data easily accessible and classified for AI, while working across functions to create data governance programs that combat ransomware and prevent against the misuse of corporate data in AI. Storage teams will need to know where sensitive data lurks and have tools to develop auditable data workflows that prevent sensitive data leakage.?
Top Takeaway:? Storage IT pros will continue to evolve from managing storage technologies to managing data and its lifecycles independently of where it is stored.
?
Last Words
The year 2025 will see more mandates than ever before when it comes to the management of valuable unstructured data assets. Komprise CEO Kumar Goswami outlines a plan to address the top priorities in this blog.
?
You can subscribe to our blog to receive new posts in your inbox and check out what's new by visiting our Resource Center.
Comment on the post or send a note to:
Strategic Program Manager & Customer Success Manager
2 个月Fantastic analysis! Looking forward to Komprise in '25!
GTM leader focused on building and running global software marketing teams.
2 个月Great set of predictions here. It's clear unstructured data is the fuel for AI and it must be classified, managed and governed well to be successful now and in the future.