Unstructured Data Growth Wearing Holes in IT Budgets

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As companies store more unstructured data, companies find that it’s taking an ever-bigger cut of the IT budget. That is forcing some firms widen the search for solutions that can help them better manage it, according to a new survey from Komprise.

For the 2021 Unstructured Data Management Report, Komprise survey more than 300 IT leaders at companies in the US and the UK to gauge the state of their unstructured data management strategies.

Source: Komprise 2021 Unstructured Data Management Report

Komprise found that 65% of companies are spending more than 30% of their IT budget on data storage and data protection–a significant amount, considering all of the other priorities that IT organizations are faced with, while 21% say they spend 40% to 50% of their IT budgets on data storage and protection. Nearly two-thirds (62.5%) said they would spend more on storage in 2021 versus last year, while only 12% said they would spend less.

The cloud figures highly in this story about data growth and spending. According to the survey, about 75% of the companies surveyed had some data in the cloud, either in a hybrid cloud or a straight cloud setting. More than two out of four (43%) are set to increase their cloud storage spending. In fact, nearly 50% of the survey respondents said they would spend half of their IT budgets on cloud data storage over the next two years.

It’s not surprising, then, that nearly half (44.9%) of survey respondents expressed the desire to avoid rising costs. To get there, 45% will look to invest in analytics tools, while 44.5% state they want better visibility for planning. Vendor lock-in, growth of data lakes, and the desire to be agile also are playing key roles in shaping companies’ data futures.

2021 Unstructured Data Management Report

All in all, the survey shows that companies desire a more systematic way to deal with data, as opposed to the current disconnected, ad-hoc approach, the vendor says. Such an approach would benefit companies in several ways, including improving their ability to know when to move data off hot storage to warm or cold storage, and to know what data requires active backups and DR and what data can be on resilient storage.

Migrating more data to the cloud was a top priority for 56.1% of respondents, according to the Komprise report, while 46.5% cited “saving cloud costs” as a top concern. Data governance and getting visibility into data usage were also cited as concerns by 42.1% and 37.9% of respondents, respectively.

Companies want to be able to glean insight into their data, while also managing the data in a more holistic manner, says Komprise President and COO Krishna Subramanian. “The survey shows that enterprises want analytics and systematic data management to make the best decisions on cloud migrations and archiving,” she says. “The end goal is to cut storage costs and create new value from unstructured data over time.”

You can download a copy of Komprise’s new report at www.komprise.com/product/intelligent-data-management/.

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