Komprise has emerged as a leader in helping organizations manage the sprawl of their unstructured data. The company helps organizations manage and optimize data storage, especially in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments. Komprise’s software provides insights into data usage, helps identify cost-saving opportunities, and enables data tiering and archiving, among other data management tasks.
Earlier this month, the company delivered its 2023 Komprise Unstructured Data Management Report, a comprehensive survey of how IT organizations are thinking about unstructured data. This week, Komprise announced a new data management capability, Storage Insights, delivered as part of the latest update to its leading Intelligent Data Management platform.
News: State of Unstructured Data Report
This is the third consecutive year that Komprise has published a survey of the happening in the unstructured data market. While there’s a lot to digest in this report, it makes clear that there are two priorities for IT storage administrators.
The report tells us that IT shops are laser-focused on effectively supporting the rapidly expanding needs of AI. It also highlights that managing the growing amount of unstructured data across an increasingly multi-cloud infrastructure is a continual challenge.
AI and Unstructured Data
According to the Komprise survey, 65% of organizations were focused on delivering unstructured data to their big data analytics platforms in 2022. In contrast, by 2023, the landscape has shifted towards AI as the dominant technology. Preparing for AI became the top data storage priority, with 31% of respondents indicating this as their primary focus. Cloud cost optimization followed closely at 22%, a shift from 2022 when cloud migrations were the top initiative.
Organizations must implement cost optimization strategies to address the shift towards AI, including monitoring cloud spending, managing cloud sprawl, and ensuring efficient data management. Eliminating storage waste was crucial to free up resources for AI initiatives, requiring a balance between high-performance, scalable storage on-premises and in the cloud while keeping costs in check.
Choosing the right AI tools is also essential, but concerns about data management, security, ethics, and accuracy must be addressed. Despite these concerns, businesses are not dissuaded from pursuing generative AI, with 90% of organizations allowing employees to use the technology.
Taming Unstructured Data
To mitigate risks associated with unstructured data in AI, organizations are adopting various strategies, including deploying storage, data management, and security tools (40%), working with existing security/governance vendors (35%), leveraging existing data storage and unstructured data management solutions (32%), forming internal task forces (31%), or collaborating with AI vendors with adequate protections and controls (26%).
The importance of unstructured data governance is also highlighted, as it remained a top priority among Chief Data Officers. Self-service data management is also becoming a trend, allowing data stakeholders across departments to have a say in data management decisions while IT retains some control.
Data volumes continue to grow, with 32% of organizations managing 10PB or more of data in 2023. Despite more options for data storage and backup solutions, organizations still need to dedicate a significant portion of their IT budget to storage. Balancing performance with cost savings and sustainability goals is crucial.
Challenges in unstructured data management include moving data without disruption and preparing for AI. Preparing for AI requires a deep understanding of data assets and solutions that can analyze, classify, and segment data to optimize storage costs.
Future capabilities for unstructured data management software are seen as monitoring and alerting for capacity issues and anomalies, policy-based automation, self-service access, and data protection.
There’s far more than what I’ve touched on here in Komprise’s survey. I encourage you to read the entire report. There’s a lot to think about in the results.
Komprise Storage Insights
Addressing many of the needs highlighted in its report, Komprise launched its new Storage Insights capability this week, integrating the feature into its Intelligent Data Management 5.0 platform. Storage Insights offers a unified view of data usage and storage consumption across various vendors and clouds, simplifying management without needing multiple consoles.
Storage Insights enables administrators to analyze storage metrics across different locations and sites, including department-specific data such as cold data amounts, recent data growth, free space availability, and data tiering. It provides more than 25 customizable columns for users to track and manage enterprise storage assets efficiently.
The feature also allows users to act without disrupting data access, utilizing Komprise Transparent Move Technology. This includes transparently tiering cold data to cheaper storage, identifying cloud migration opportunities, detecting potential security threats, and setting alert thresholds for unusual data activity.
Komprise tells us that with the explosive growth of unstructured data across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments, Storage Insights aims to simplify data management and service delivery while optimizing data storage investments for organizations.
Storage Insights is part of the Komprise Intelligent Data Management 5.0 platform and is available with Komprise Analysis and Komprise Elastic Data Migration, offering various prebuilt reports and platform updates.
Storage Insights is unique in the market in providing a holistic view of an enterprise’s unstructured data across cloud boundaries, including data stored on-prem on nearly every storage vendor’s solution. That’s powerful.
Analysis
There are surprisingly few tools on the market targeted towards managing the complexities of unstructured data in a hybrid-cloud environment. Komprise not only serves this market, it’s also aggressive in keeping pace with innovations. Just this year, it introduced its Komprise Analysis tool, intelligent tiering for Azure, new automated data governance capabilities, and this week, its new Storage Insights. It works with every public cloud provider, and it partners with nearly every one of the tier-one on-prem storage vendors. It’s a nice story.
The innovation is paying off. In February, Komprise disclosed that in 2022, it doubled its annual subscription revenues for the third consecutive year, doing so with 120% net dollar retention. The company also closed a $37M funding round in 2023, showing continuing investor interest. I’m not the only analyst who likes Komprise; the company makes nearly storage-focused ranking in its space.
As unstructured data becomes a central concern for IT administrators, the market needs tools to manage the sprawl while also addressing top-level governance and data protection directives. This is where Komprise is strong. This company continues to evolve, keeping a step ahead of the needs of the market it’s serving. This is what makes a leader.
