Unstructured Data Trends: Reader's Choice

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 AI. Learn more about Komprise, a SaaS solution for unstructured data management and mobility here and follow us on LinkedIn.

Last month we covered trends 2024 trends and predictions for unstructured data management. Read it here.

This month’s newsletter covers leading topics for enterprise data management and storage, with a look at our top-read blogs and white papers from the last 12 months.

Top 3 Blogs at Komprise.com

Unstructured data management has evolved tremendously over the past several years.? As data grows, as its diversity in type and location expands and as data become a larger asset to manage, govern and share, the use cases have also grown accordingly. First, what is unstructured data management?

An analytics-based unstructured data management solution brings value by analyzing all data in storage across on-premises and cloud environments to deliver deep insights. This knowledge helps IT managers make great decisions with users in mind, optimize costs and reduce security and regulatory compliance risks. These insights go beyond traditional storage metrics such as latency, IOPS and network throughput.?

Here's our #1 top-read blog of 2023: It’s all about mergers & acquisitions, which can create havoc in data management.

Among the tips to avoid unnecessary chaos and ensure data from merged entities is in the right place:

Just say no to the data storage dump.?It’s common to take all or most of the data from the original entity and dump it onto storage infrastructure at the new company. While this may seem like the simplest way to handle a data migration, it’s highly inefficient.

The better approach: analytics-driven migration.?Start by creating a global index of all data that exists at the time of the merger, acquisition or divestiture.?The data index ensures you can make the right decisions about where to target each piece of data and that files are stored appropriately for specific requirements such as performance and security.

Dispose of obsolete data and archive non-critical data: Data that is no longer needed can be deleted before the transfer to save time and reduce storage costs. This may seem obvious but many enterprises don't delete data and don't have a policy for this either!

In 2nd place is a blog about?Pfizer, which has been using Komprise for more precise data management and cloud data migration, delivering savings and protecting long-term data value.

• Pfizer is saving 75% on storage by using Komprise to analyze and continuously move?cold data?to Amazon S3 as it ages.
• Storage managers and researchers both are finding additional benefits from this new analytics-based data management strategy, including zero user disruption and a foundation for data lakes.

Pfizer’s vision for unstructured data management is to host data based on its analytical profile, rather than throwing high availability storage at it. This is a cultural shift, since researchers often worry about losing their data or visibility into it. Yet Komprise’s analytics approach has proven that Pfizer’s?cloud data strategy is safe and transparent to users—and supports the company’s higher-level mission.

Another popular blog covered Komprise Storage Insights.

Storage Insights, announced last Fall, gives storage experts a single console to see data usage and storage consumption information across vendors and clouds.?This saves time, as normally, the storage pro needs to login to each storage technologies dashboard to get the metrics and then try to consolidate them for trends which is a hassle. By adding data-centric metrics to the view, such as top data by owners, fastest growing data by location, and amount of inactive or cold data, you can make new correlations.? Seeing all this in one place helps IT managers make better decisions faster.

“The Storage Insights functionality will give us the ability to see our storage footprint across our hybrid cloud. It’s a single interface that will show us important metrics like capacity usage in every storage location, which will save us a lot of time and ensure we make the right decisions for our departments and users.” — Matt Madill, storage systems administrator at?Duquesne University.

Top 3 White Papers

Readers gravitated toward our original research to learn about trends and patterns in the data storage industry. They also wanted to get under the covers of our platform, and learn about how to save more in the cloud.

The Komprise 2023 State of Unstructured Data Management.? In 2023 we released our third-annual state of the industry, which surveyed 300 IT decision-makers across the US and the UK.

Our 2023 research found that IT leaders are focusing on three core areas in the coming year:

• Preparing for AI;
• Delivering data services such as file search and tagging for departmental users and;
• Adopting cloud cost optimization strategies.

The amalgamation of these trends reflects the maturation of unstructured data management. IT and storage directors are now expected to align closely with high-priority enterprise goals for AI and data-driven initiatives.

?Key Statistics:

• Most organizations?(90%)?allow employee use of generative AI yet 66% of organizations cited top data governance concerns of preventing security and privacy violations, lack of data source transparency leading to unethical, biased or inaccurate outputs and corporate data leakage into the vendor’s AI model;
• The majority (40%) will pursue a multi-pronged approach to manage AI risk, encompassing storage, data management and security tools;
• Organizations managing more than 10PB of data grew from 27% to 32% this year, a 19% increase.
• Nearly three-quarters?(73%)?are spending 30% or more of IT budget on data storage and protection, measurably higher than 67% in 2022;
• The top?unstructured data management challenge is moving data without disrupting users and applications?(47%), followed closely by preparing for AI and cloud services (46%);?

Komprise Architecture Overview

This white paper describes the leading design principles of the Komprise Intelligent Data Management SaaS as well as its key architectural components, which include:

• Komprise Elastic Grid
• Komprise Policy Engine
• Transparent Move Technology (TMT)
• Cloud File System
• Deep Analytics
• Smart Data Workflows
• Elastic Data Migration?

Cloud Tiering: Storage-based Versus Gateways Versus File-based

Tiering cold data to the cloud is a proven strategy for freeing up space on expensive network attached storage (NAS) and cutting significant costs from data storage.? Data tiering is a modern variation of archiving, delivering an easily accessible online archive for older, rarely-used data.? However, there are distinct differences between how storage vendors deliver tiering and how an independent unstructured data management solution such as Komprise delivers file-based tiering to maximize cost savings and assure a great user experience.? This white paper, available here, goes over the differences in detail.

Komprise COO Krishna Subramanian describes the benefits of file-level tiering in this short video:

Last Words…

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