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Data Storage Management Services: Addressing the Unstructured Data Explosion

Executive Summary
Enterprises today face an unprecedented surge in unstructured data, encompassing emails, documents, images, and videos. This exponential growth presents significant challenges: escalating storage costs, inadequate data governance leading to compliance risks, and heightened vulnerability to security breaches and data loss. Traditional approaches of simply adding storage capacity are unsustainable and inefficient. Data Storage Management Services (DSMS) offer a strategic solution by providing comprehensive capabilities for optimizing storage, enhancing data governance, and mitigating risks associated with unstructured data. By implementing DSMS, organizations can achieve substantial cost savings, improved operational efficiency, and strengthened data security posture.
Introduction
The volume of unstructured data is growing at an accelerated pace, creating an urgent need for effective data management strategies. This growth strains resources and exposes organizations to potential risks. Specifically, businesses face three critical challenges:
  • Rising Operational Costs and Inefficiency: Continuous storage capacity expansion without optimization leads to escalating costs. IT spending is projected to increase significantly, further burdened by expanding IT environments across on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud, and SaaS applications. 
  • Inadequate Data Governance and Compliance Risks: Lack of robust data policies, retention management, and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) detection exposes organizations to legal and compliance issues. 
  • Security Breaches and Data Loss: Failure to identify and mitigate risks, stemming from the absence of data sensitivity labeling, risk classification, and detailed analytics, puts organizations at risk of security breaches. The cost of a data breach is significant and growing.
A fragmented approach to data management, relying on disparate solutions for storage, archiving, and analytics, exacerbates these challenges. Data silos, inconsistent policies, and increased risks of data loss or noncompliance become commonplace.
DSMS solutions offer a unified approach to address these challenges by overseeing the lifecycle of data residing on-premises, in hybrid, multi-cloud, and SaaS environments.
Understanding Data Storage Management Services (DSMS)
DSMS solutions employ data discovery technology to perform classification, categorization, and tagging, providing valuable insights into unstructured data. These insights drive improved storage efficiencies, cost optimization, new analytics workflows, enhanced data compliance practices, and strengthened security standards. By identifying unused or underutilized data, DSMS automates data lifecycle management strategies. DSMS is not necessarily a single product, but rather a collection of capabilities that may be offered by a single vendor or require multiple solutions.
Popular DSMS use cases include:
  • Storage Optimization 
  • Data Lifecycle Management and Archiving 
  • Enhancing Data Governance and Reporting
Escalating Costs and Inefficiencies from Lack of Optimization
The Challenge
Organizations struggle to manage the relentless growth of data, burdened by inefficient use of existing storage, a lack of visibility and insights, and difficulties in managing data at scale.
The DSMS Solution
DSMS provides a unified platform to manage data across on-premises and cloud environments, offering analytics, data maps, and historical growth analysis. This enables organizations to understand storage usage patterns, identify underutilized resources, and pinpoint optimization opportunities.
DSMS optimizes data storage by ensuring frequently accessed data resides on high-performance storage tiers, while infrequently accessed data is moved to cost-effective tiers. While data tiering has existed for decades, DSMS provides the automation needed to make it effective across disparate unstructured data sources.
Advanced analytics support data lifecycle management, data migrations, and intelligent archiving decisions. Combining data classification and categorization with analysis of data usage patterns allows for informed decisions about data migration, archiving, disposal, and deletion.
DSMS can efficiently scan and analyze large datasets, offering insights that are critical for effective data management. Remediation at scale enables organizations to move, migrate, or delete large datasets within limited time windows.
Recommendations
  • Evaluate and shortlist DSMS solutions based on their ability to manage data across environments, providing comprehensive analytics, data maps, and historical growth analysis to optimize storage. 
  • Choose DSMS solutions that can optimize data center and cloud storage capacity by relocating data for efficient storage use, ensuring frequently accessed data is stored in high-performance tiers and less critical data in cost-effective tiers. 
  • Select DSMS solutions that offer robust analytics for data lifecycle management, migration, and intelligent archiving to make informed decisions about data storage throughout its lifecycle. 
  • Evaluate DSMS solutions capable of managing large amounts of unstructured data at scale, providing detailed metadata information and comprehensive reporting to facilitate efficient data management and reduce redundancy.
Compliance and Regulatory Risks from Inadequate Data Governance
The Challenge
Organizations face the challenge of ensuring unstructured data complies with regulatory requirements.
The DSMS Solution
DSMS supports oversight of data policies and retention management, enabling organizations to consistently define and enforce policies that align with legal and regulatory mandates. DSMS ensures data is stored in secure and compliant environments, which is particularly crucial for regulated industries such as healthcare (HIPAA), financial services, and life sciences.
DSMS enhances data governance by providing tools for permissions analysis, PII detection, and compliance management, enabling organizations to monitor and control access to sensitive data.
Recommendations
  • Choose DSMS solutions that integrate data policies with retention management to ensure compliance with legal and regulatory mandates. 
  • Ensure the DSMS solutions can store data in compliant environments to avoid potential legal pitfalls and fines. 
  • Select DSMS solutions that enhance data governance with permissions analysis, PII detection, and compliance tools to monitor and control access to sensitive data. 
  • Opt for DSMS solutions that maintain data lineage and offer robust auditing features to ensure data integrity, accountability, and regulatory compliance.
Security Breaches and Data Loss from Unmitigated Risks in Unstructured Data
The Challenge
Unstructured data lacks inherent structure, making classification and security difficult.
The DSMS Solution
DSMS addresses this by providing sensitivity label management and risk classification, allowing organizations to categorize data based on its sensitivity and risk profile. Some DSMS solutions offer blockchain-backed audit trails, ensuring the integrity and traceability of data access and modifications.
DSMS offers comprehensive reporting capabilities, including detailed analytics with metadata insights and customizable reports, providing a clear overview of data usage, risk levels, and compliance status.
Recommendations
  • Seek DSMS solutions that offer sensitivity label management and risk classification to categorize data based on sensitivity and risk profile. 
  • Prioritize DSMS solutions with robust reporting capabilities, including detailed analytics, metadata insights, and customizable reports, to provide a clear overview of data usage, risk levels, and compliance status. 
  • Consider DSMS solutions with blockchain-backed audit trails for enhanced data integrity and traceability.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
  • By 2028, at least 40% of organizations will deploy DSMS solutions for classification, insights, and optimization, up from 15% in early 2024. 
  • By 2028, 70% of file and object data will be deployed on a consolidated unstructured data storage platform, up from 35% in early 2024. 
  • By 2028, large enterprises will triple their unstructured data capacity across their on-premises, edge, and public cloud locations, compared to mid-2024.
Conclusion
Data Storage Management Services (DSMS) are essential for organizations grappling with the challenges of exponential unstructured data growth. By optimizing storage, enhancing data governance, and mitigating risks, DSMS enables businesses to achieve significant cost savings, improved efficiency, and a strengthened security posture. Embracing DSMS is a strategic imperative for organizations seeking to thrive in the data-driven landscape.