State of Unstructured Data

Management Report
The second annual survey shows IT priorities expanding from
storage cost-cutting to delivering data services, with a focus
on unstructured data analytics, end-user self-service, cloud
NAS migration and emerging use cases for generating greater
business value from data.

August 2022
Table of Contents

Executive Summary ............................................................................................ 3

Report Highlights ................................................................................................ 4

Data Continues to Grow, Accelerating Investments in Cloud Storage ............ 5

Cloud File Storage Takes Off
Benefits of Cloud Data Migrations

Unstructured Data Management Challenges: User Disruptions .................... 9

Unstructured Data Management Goals: Flexibility and No Lock-In ................ 11

Future Strategies ................................................................................................ 12

New Approaches
Unstructured Data Management Capabilities
New Cases for Unstructured Data Management

Conclusion: Top Takeaways ................................................................................ 16

About Komprise .................................................................................................. 17

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Executive Summary
The world of data storage and unstructured data management is in
continual flux: the pandemic accelerated cloud and digital initiatives The top priorities for
and global data volumes will reach 97 ZB in 2022. This is amplifying the unstructured data
pressures on enterprise IT—more than 50% are managing at least 5 PB management in 2022
of data today, a percentage that has grown significantly in just one year.
are moving data to big
What to do with all this data moving forward is a pivotal question, as data analytics platforms,
the wrong strategy—or no strategy at all—creates waste, introduces
enabling self-service
risks and minimizes the potential for leveraging data in new ways for
organizational and marketplace gain. We attempted to uncover these so business users can
challenges and opportunities in our latest industry survey: The 2022 securely leverage data
Komprise Unstructured Data Management Report. services such as cloud
As unstructured data volumes continue to grow, IT leaders are realizing AI/ML and data lakes
the need to manage data differently and are struggling to do so. In and optimizing data
2022, 87% of IT leaders rate managing unstructured data growth as a
storage infrastructure by
top priority, up from 70% in 2021. Leading challenges in 2022 include
moving data to the cloud without disrupting users and applications, the increasing investments
high costs of data storage and backups, hindered visibility into data’s in cloud storage.
characteristics and complying with laws and regulations.

The 2022 Komprise Unstructured Data Management Report

examines the challenges and opportunities with unstructured data
in the enterprise—from how much data enterprises are managing to
cloud data priorities and future approaches for data management.
This report summarizes responses of 300 global enterprise storage
IT directors, VPs and C-level executives at companies with more than
1,000 employees in the United States and in the UK. The survey was
conducted by a third party in June 2022.

©2022 Komprise, Inc. All rights reserved. 3

Highlights of the Report

Unstructured Data Management

Challenges
• More than 50% of enterprises are managing 5PB or more of data, compared with
less than 40% in 2021.

• Nearly 68% are spending more than 30% of the IT budget on data storage, backups
and disaster recovery.

• On-premises only environments decreased from 20% to 12%.

• The largest obstacle (42%) is moving data without disrupting users and
applications.

Unstructured Data Management

Priorities

• Nearly half (47%) will invest in cloud NAS, followed by cloud object storage (43%).

• After cutting costs, the second highest expected benefit of cloud migrations is to
improve self-service for end users and departments (43%).

• A majority (65%) of organizations plan to or are already delivering unstructured data

to their big data analytics platforms.

• The top goal (43%) is to adopt new storage and cloud technologies without incurring
extra licensing penalties and costs.

• The leading new approach for unstructured data management as identified in our
survey is the ability to initiate and execute data workflows (43%).

• The leading new use case for unstructured data management is protecting sensitive
data (63%) followed by big data analytics (41%).

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Data Continues to Grow, Accelerating
Investments in Cloud Storage
In 2021, we reported that unstructured data volumes
The current amount of data
were growing too quickly, straining IT budgets. That
trend continues in 2022—with even higher volumes and being managed:
spending plans.

• More than 50% of organizations are managing 5PB

or more of data, compared with less than 40% in
2021.

• At least 80% of this data is unstructured, with the

top file types reported as documents and user data,
research data and video and audio files.

• Nearly 68% are spending more than 30% of their

IT budget on data storage, backups and disaster
recovery—similar to 2021.

• However... Nearly 70% said they would spend more

on storage YoY, compared with 62% in 2021.
.

Current percentage of IT
budget that is being spent
on data storage and data
protection:

©2022 Komprise, Inc. All rights reserved. 5

 The types of unstructured data being stored:

Cloud File Storage Takes Off

Hybrid cloud again persists as the primary storage architecture, with
50% reporting a mixed storage environment across on-premises
and cloud—the same percentage as 2021. However, in just one year, the
percentage of participants reporting on-premises only environments
decreased from 20% to 11.9%. More than 20% of environments reported a
multi-cloud environment and 15% reported a cloud-only environment.

As traditional storage vendors and cloud providers alike introduce new

offerings for cloud file storage, enterprises are jumping at the opportunity
to free capacity on their expensive on-premises NAS while also acquiring
scalable capabilities for backup and disaster recovery.

Cloud NAS topped the list for storage investments in the next year. Cloud
object storage came in second, followed by cloud archives such as AWS S3
Glacier. One-third reported they’d buy more on-premises storage.

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 Where most data is being stored today:

Expansion plans in the next 12 months:

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 Benefits of Cloud Data Migrations
When asked what benefits they expected from moving unstructured data to the cloud, the majority
(56%) of IT executives were most interested in cutting costs. Yet the second-highest expected
benefit (43%) was to improve self-service for end users and departments.

As enterprises double down on digital initiatives to hasten a post-pandemic recovery, IT organizations

are seeking ways to speed time to delivery for end-users and departments through better self-
service. These strategies offer easier data access, simpler reporting, more accessible analytics via
cloud data lakes and cloud ML/AI services and low-code tools for citizen development of apps and
sites.

In data management, self-service typically refers to the ability for authorized users outside of storage
disciplines to search, tag and enrich and act on data through automation. For instance, a research
scientist could identify project files she wants to export to a cloud analytics service and then create a
policy to automatically move those files as they are created.

Benefits expected from moving Data management self-service is viable

unstructured data to the cloud: with:

• Strong governance including role-based

access;
• Simple search using a central console or
index that looks across all files no matter
where they’re stored and;
• The ability to create automated
workflows supporting all the steps from
automated metadata tagging, search and
movement of data to external platforms
for analysis where it can be further
enriched.

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 Unstructured Data Management
Challenges: User Disruptions
Traditionally, controlling data storage costs and delivering
reliable access to data have been the core responsibilities of
storage teams. As unstructured data has grown in volume
and variety, the challenges have amplified; in 2021, 30% of IT
directors said that managing unstructured data wasn’t a big
challenge, compared with 2022 in which only 13% said the
same. Progressive organizations are looking to move from
a storage-centric approach focused on managing storage
technologies to a data-centric approach where data drives all
decisions independently of the storage platforms in use.

IT leaders need a nuanced approach to data which doesn’t

treat all data the same but considers its lifecycle for active
access, longer-term storage, governance and future analytics
potential.

Survey participants note that the largest obstacle relates to user experience: moving
data without disrupting users and applications. It’s critical to be able to move data to the
optimal storage platforms for performance and cost yet in many cases people can’t find files
after they’ve moved—creating frustrations all around.

Unstructured data management solutions should move data transparently so that users can
simply click on the link to the file exactly as before and applications work as before.

Other top unstructured data management challenges include:

• Data is growing too fast and is too expensive to store and back up;
• A lack of visibility into data and its characteristics to inform mobility decisions and;
• The need to deploy different data management strategies to comply with legal/
regulatory requirements.

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 Meanwhile, more than half of respondents stated
that these challenges are impeding larger goals for
42% see moving
the organization: leveraging data for new uses and
data without disrupting
supporting marketplace growth. users and applications
as the top challenge.

Top challenges with unstructured data management today:

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 Unstructured Data Management
Goals: Flexibility and No Lock-In
We asked IT leaders about their goals for improving their unstructured data management
strategy – and topping the list was flexibility. Specifically, organizations wish to adopt new
storage and cloud technologies without incurring extra licensing penalties and costs, such
as cloud egress fees. This finding is enlightening, indicating that more than cutting costs,
organizations wish to take advantage of new technologies and switch between technologies
(such as cloud providers and cloud storage classes) as needed to meet shifting business goals
and user requirements.

The second highest goal was attaining a systematic

data management approach to reduce manual effort
and complexity. This entails automated policies for data
movement—such as tiering data to secondary storage
after it reaches one year of age or moving research data
with certain metadata tags to cloud archival storage.

IT leaders also prioritized better visibility and analytics

for planning, reducing manual effort and errors for data
migrations and the need to better support broader data
initiatives and departmental needs.

Top objectives for improving unstructured data

management strategy:

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 Future Strategies
We asked participants to share their plans for data storage investments, new
unstructured data management approaches, emerging use cases and future needs
for unstructured data management capabilities.

Investments: In the next 12 months, the top investment strategy for storage is
migrating to the cloud (55%), followed by investing in data management and mobility
tools and increasing cloud file storage investments. As IT infrastructure and business
applications and processes generally move to the cloud and IT organizations require
sophisticated tools and automation to control this complex environment, it is natural
that storage and data management would follow suit. At the same time, nearly 30%
of organizations will still invest in on-premises storage and 34% plan to modernize
backup and disaster recovery systems, indicating the resilience of a multi-vendor,
hybrid cloud environment.

Data storage investment priorities in the

next 12 months:

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 New Approaches
Advances in cloud data management and analytics
along with edge processing is offering more choices for
IT organizations seeking to efficiently mobilize data for
new uses. Earlier this year, a survey on 2022 IT spending
plans conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group found that
organizations are prioritizing the use of next-generation
technology and the ability to handle data where it’s
generated. ESG also found that 62% of IT decision-makers
will increase spending on AI & ML this year. Since ML
models require large amounts of data to increase accuracy,
incorporating unstructured data is table stakes going
forward.

Our survey found that unstructured data and AI/ML are colliding, ushering in a new era for
enterprise data analytics:

65% of organizations plan to or are already delivering unstructured

data to their big data analytics platforms.

Another top new approach for unstructured New approaches to unstructured data
data management is the ability to initiate
management being taken or planned:
and execute data workflows, such as
searching and moving files with specific
metadata (aka project name or customer
group) to a cloud data lake (43%).
Automating the process of moving specific
data sets to platforms for processing and
analysis is the future of unstructured data
management and will speed time-to-value
for big data analytics initiatives.

Enterprises are also looking to create

automated data management policies—a
top initiative in 2021—and understand
anomalies to predict and prevent
unexpected capacity needs or ransomware
issues. Analytics on unstructured data
is now becoming imperative to not only
manage costs and performance but to
protect organizations from malicious actors.

©2022 Komprise, Inc. All rights reserved. 13

 Unstructured Data Management Capabilities
Unstructured data management must be independent and agnostic from data storage,
backup and cloud infrastructure technology platforms. The reason being? Most enterprises
have several storage, backup and disaster recovery vendors in place. Rather than managing
these technologies (and the data stored on them) in silos, an unstructured data management
platform should work across all storage so that IT professionals can make data-centric
decisions.

Advanced analytics and reporting will be the most important capability of these
solutions (nearly 53%), according to the survey. Analytics on data is imperative for making
the best decisions on where data should live and when it should move elsewhere. It can
answer questions like: how much data do I have and where is it stored, how large are my files
and of what type, how old is my data, what is the cost of storing it in different places, who last
accessed it and which data is “active” versus which data is “cold.”

Other top requirements for unstructured data management software include monitoring
and proactive alerting of key events such as running out of quota, a data service
becoming unresponsive or anomalous activities, as well as data tagging and search.

The most important future unstructured data

management capabilities:

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New Use Cases for Unstructured Data Management
Organizations typically begin their journey with unstructured data management by cutting storage and
backup costs through analytics and automation. Beyond cost savings—primarily accomplished by moving
older, less active data off of expensive on-premises storage—enterprises are most interested in the following use
cases:

63% Protect Sensitive Data

Cybersecurity remains one of the leading priorities for IT organizations, particularly as
ransomware, supply chain breaches and other sophisticated security attacks continue
to increase. Individuals responsible for storage and data management are looking at
how they can aid prevention and recovery through secure off-site backups including to
immutable object lock storage in the cloud.

41% Big Data Analytics

Researchers and users want to search and run analytics on unstructured data.
Searching for files with specific characteristics or from specific projects across all data
has historically involved Herculean manual effort. Modern data management platforms
can index data, support metadata tagging for easier search and classification and
automate workflows to move data to analytics platforms and further enrich the data
with new tags as needed.

36% Segment and Integrate Data for M&A

During mergers and acquisitions, data management can be an afterthought but without
proper planning, data can get lost, damaged, or mismanaged during transfers between
entities--creating legal and security issues. Unstructured data management solutions
minimize these risks by identifying data appropriate for deletion, analyzing the optimal
target storage for different data sets and ensuring migrations are error-free.

35% Enable Deletion Policies

The elephant in the room is the fact that organizations don’t like to delete data and
therefore rarely do. But now, it’s possible to safely delete old data that has outlived its
purpose in a scheduled and monitored way, reducing management costs and eliminating
the security risks of hidden and forgotten data. This also supports compliance when
rules and regulations require the deletion of certain data—such as PII—after a period of
time.

©2022 Komprise, Inc. All rights reserved. 15

Conclusion
In the hybrid cloud era, enterprise IT organizations are pivoting from managing storage to managing data.
With so much innovation in the cloud, IT leaders want to help users leverage cloud data services for faster
collaboration, processing and AI/ML projects: ensuring that the right data sets can always be leveraged there is a
top initiative. Key priorities include cloud file storage, self-service capabilities, non-disruptive user experience,
flexibility and expanded use cases for data protection and big data analysis. With a data-centric versus
storage-centric approach, IT leaders can stop the cycle of buying and managing storage technology and
focus on delivering an efficient, value-driven unstructured data management practice benefiting users and
the business at large.

Top 5 Takeaways:

Cloud File Storage Takes Off

As enterprises store more and more unstructured data at high costs, moving files to the
cloud makes good economic sense. Cloud NAS is the preferred technology, but cloud
object storage is a close follower as enterprises realize the need to tier rarely-accessed
data to lower-cost storage as soon as possible.

Self-Service is a Top Goal for Cloud Data Migrations

In 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.

Data Management Cannot Disrupt User Experience

Survey participants note that the largest obstacle to unstructured data management is
moving data without disrupting users and applications, which occurs when organizations
move data and files to new storage locations and users later can’t find their files.
Solutions that enable transparent access to files once moved are critical.

Flexibility and No Lock-In are Strategic Priorities

IT organizations wish to adopt new storage and cloud technologies and switch between
technologies (such as cloud providers and cloud storage classes) without incurring extra
licensing penalties and costs, such as cloud egress fees.

Unstructured Data Management Use Cases Expand

Enterprises will remain cost-conscious above all: saving money on storage with smart
data lifecycle management practices. Yet as unstructured data management matures as
a practice, new priorities are emerging—including data protection, big data analytics, data
deletion and M&A requirements for data transfers and segmentation.

©2022 Komprise, Inc. All rights reserved. 16

 About Komprise
Komprise is a provider of unstructured data management and mobility soft-
ware that frees enterprises to easily analyze, mobilize, and monetize the right
file and object data across clouds without shackling data to any vendor. With
Komprise Intelligent Data Management, you can cut 70% of enterprise storage,
backup and cloud costs while making data easily available to cloud-based data
lakes and analytics tools.

Learn more at www.komprise.com

©2022 Komprise, Inc. All rights reserved. 17