IT leaders struggle to support unstructured data in the cloud

The majority of organizations are managing more than 1PB of data and spending more than 30 percent of their IT budgets on data storage and protection, according to a new report into unstructured data from data management company Komprise.

Based on responses from 300 IT storage decision makers at companies in the US and UK, it finds 65.5 percent of organizations spend more than 30 percent of their IT budgets on data storage and management.

This expenditure shows no signs of slowing down, with 62.5 percent planning to spend more on storage in 2021 compared to 2020. While half of companies have a mix of cloud and on-premise storage, moving to the cloud is a clear priority. Top priorities for cloud data management include migrating data to the cloud (56 percent), cutting storage and data costs (46 percent), and governance and security of data in the cloud (41 percent).

In terms of spending, investing in analytics tools is the highest priority (45 percent) over buying more cloud or on-premises storage or modernizing backups.

There also concerns over effectively managing the lifecycle of data. A third of enterprises acknowledge that over 50 percent of their data is 'cold' while 20 percent don’t know.

"The Komprise 2021 State of Unstructured Data Management Report provides valuable insights into key customer priorities in unstructured data management," says Krishna Subramanian, president and COO of Komprise. "The survey shows that enterprises want analytics and systematic data management to make the best decisions on cloud migrations and archiving. The end goal is to cut storage costs and create new value from unstructured data over time."

The full report is available from the Komprise site.

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