Demystifying the Unstructured: The Modern Way of Understanding Business Data

Article By Amit Luthra - Director & General Manager – Data Center Solution, Dell Technologies India.

The amount of data the world is generating is growing exponentially. As per industry reports, the worldwide data is expected to grow up to 175 zettabytes by 2025. While businesses are gearing up to make the most of this new opportunity, the rise of data has also forced them to scout for more latent models of data processing. New channels of networking coupled with the emergence of user-generated data has boosted the data growth even further, especially in its unstructured form such as videos, pictures, social media, documents, etc. 

Looking at the near future, unstructured data is going to be the nucleus of an organization, irrespective of its size. It is expected that 70-80 percent of any organization’s data will be unstructured, thanks to organizations, which are heavily investing in IoT, embracing artificial intelligence, and harnessing the power of big data and analytics. This kind of data holds huge potential for business leaders. This will help them understand their business results, anticipate what’s coming, and act quickly on risk and opportunity. 

The Relevance of Unstructured Data

Unstructured data has become critical to several industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and other digital projects like smart cities etc. Let’s take an example of a smart city. A smart city is an urban dwelling that uses integration of different data sets from technology devices such as ICT, sensors & IoT networks and use the insights derived from them to manage assets and resources efficiently for providing a sophisticated living to humans. However, not many know that smart cities generate vast amounts of unstructured data. Hence, to eventually transform a city into a smarter one, there needs to be an architecture in place that can analyze these data sets and relay intelligent insights that different divisions could use.

While, all of this looks good in theory, managing the unstructured data is quite a challenge. Businesses need industry-leading IT solutions such as modern storage and server appliances that can help them harness the value of their data. Here are three points that a business should consider while buying a perfect storage appliance:

• Scalability: With humongous amounts of user data being generated regularly, the appliance should offer scalability feature to process hundreds of terabytes of raw data without disruption and a costly downtime.  
• Intelligent automation: The storage infrastructure should offer intelligent insights that can help simplify data management, and provide exemplary analysis of data sets, enabling customers deliver better outcomes.   
• Resilient and efficient: Resiliency has become a key component of any IT architecture. Today, when businesses are working with flat IT budgets and IT teams are under immense pressure to deliver maximum ROI, the scope of making a mistake has to reduce. So, a storage solution should offer high resiliency features. 

In this data era, businesses, which are nimble and agile will always have an upper hand. Effectively tackling unstructured data has become a necessity for businesses as it has spread its footprints across industries and it will only increase in the future. Hence, it has become crucial for businesses to equip themselves with the power to take control of their data. No matter where the data resides, by deploying Dell EMC PowerScale storage, they will be able to unlock its true potential. Engrossing times lies ahead and it will be fascinating to see who all can swim through the ocean of unstructured data.