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With the explosive growth of the unstructured data market continued to rise and recent statistics reflecting data creation will continue to increase to a staggering 180 Zettabytes by 2025, organisations need to ensure they’re managing their unstructured data before it becomes too big a challenge.
But why is it so important to manage silos of information, what challenges does it bring and how can organisations benefit from informed data insights? In our latest blog, we discuss how organisations can improve data management through effective data discovery, insights and analysis.
Types of unstructured data and the current unstructured data market
According to a recent report entitled Big Data Statistics 2022: Facts, Market Size and Industry Growth, 80% of an organisations data generated today is unstructured with over 95% of businesses thinking that managing unstructured data is their primary problem.
Whether it’s data provided in the form of email, telephone, photos, spreadsheets or through social media for example, there is a vast array of growing data silos, which remains unstructured. This data can be stored within Content Management Systems, Electronic Document and Record Management Systems, email stores, archives and structured environments such as databases.
Rather than disposing of the data in accordance with retention schedules, it’s typically retained in some form. It’s estimated that up to 65% of an organisation’s unstructured data is ROT (information which is redundant, obsolete and/or trivial) and up to 15% duplicated. And it’s this content that isn’t business critical which is the problem.
However, as the Big Data report states, often it’s this data that companies need to tap into to gain more insight into their customer behaviour. Furthermore, gaining visibility of data insights will improve information governance and reduce risks, in turn, improving staff productivity and providing a quality service. Understanding what data you have and why you have it, especially when it pertains to personally identifiable information has to be the starting point, and often causes inaction.
What is data discovery, insights and analysis and why is it important?
Whether to improve management of out-of-control silos today or preparing to decommission or migrate legacy file shares and EDRM platforms to the cloud, organisation’s need to determine the best technology to ensure a successful, timely and frictionless journey to successfully governed data.
Lack of visibility of data and assets can lead to numerous compliance and productivity challenges such as:
- Inaccurate data being provided to regulators
- Data breaches causing significant financial and reputational damage
- Over-retention of customer data
- Users unable to access the right information when they need it
- Overlooked strategic opportunities to drive and influence important business decisions
Furthermore, employees will often complain about these pain points:
- Challenging and time consuming to discover relevant information
- Difficulty discovering or verifying the latest version of documents
- Documents are recreated because they cannot be discovered at the time of need
- Lack of clarity for labelling and storing of information to support ease of discovery
By implementing innovative, cloud-based technology solutions to understand and discover what data an organisation holds, companies can make intelligent, informed business decisions provided from high valuable discovery, analysis and insights. This can lead to effective outcomes such as gaining full visibility of your data estate, better management of your unstructured data and reduce data breaches, increase user productivity, improved data quality and reduce data storage costs.
Discovery, insights and analysis from Automated Intelligence
AI.DATALIFT from Automated Intelligence provides real-time, intuitive dashboards to deliver high value discovery, analysis and insights to enable business transformation plans for the journey to the cloud. To discover more, download our solutions guide here, or visit our website www.automated-intelligence.com
