A report from cloud data management specialist Komprise finds that organisations are increasingly looking to migrate data to the cloud in response to the growing volumes of data they have to manage — particularly unstructured data. However, the report also finds that many organisations have a lack of visibility into how data is used, which is hampering their planning and their ability to minimise storage costs.
The Komprise 2021 State of Unstructured Data Management Report is based on the results of a survey of 300 enterprise storage IT decision makers at companies with more than 1000 employees in the US and UK.
Findings include that over 60 per cent of enterprises are managing more than 1PB of data, while nearly 40 per cent are managing more than 5PB of data. As a result, organisations are spending much of the their IT budget on data management, with a majority indicating that spending on storage, backups and disaster recovery is between 30 and 40 per cent of their entire IT budget. The figure is over 40 and as high 50 per cent of budget for some 21 per cent of respondents.
In response to this, the report finds that over 56 per cent of respondents are seeking to migrate more data to the cloud, because unstructured data is growing too fast and getting too expensive to store and back up.
When it comes to the main objectives for improving their unstructured data management strategy, about 44 per cent indicated they needed the visibility to plan better. A similar percentage said they wanted to avoid rising storage and backup costs.
As Komprise is a cloud data management firm, the report happily finds that at least 45 per cent of respondents are looking to invest in analytics tools for better visibility into their data usage patterns within the next year.
According to Komprise COO Krishna Subramanian, better visibility is critical for cutting costs, planning migrations, and understanding business usage.
“The survey finds that 65 per cent of organisations are already spending 30 per cent or more of their IT budgets on storage, and most expect their spending to grow. This is why companies see getting visibility into how data is being used as key to managing [data] costs and transforming to the cloud. Businesses also find it useful for compliance and security reasons to get analytics on data usage,” she said.
Another finding from the report is that companies need to stop treating all data the same, and should let usage patterns dictate policies.
“We find that 70 to 80 per cent of data in most companies has not been accessed in over a year and is cold. Yet most of this data is being actively managed, consuming not just expensive storage but also backups and DR resources,” Subramanian said.
“In fact, 80 per cent of the cost of data is not in the storage but in the active management. By giving visibility into what data is hot and what data is cold, we can transparently move the cold data to a resilient cloud object store and cut 80 per cent of storage and backup costs.”
Subramanian also had some best practice tips for organisations:
- Analyse data usage and growth and have a system for doing this continuously;
- Create strategies and select storage and data management partners that give you the flexibility to adopt new technologies whenever your business requires it;
- Educate your business stakeholders on the data lifecycle.
