The Rising Tide of Unstructured Data: Challenges and Solutions for Scalable Archiving

Data is being generated faster than ever, and the rate is accelerating exponentially. Businesses are reluctant to discard information they’ve developed, and they are often legally required to preserve the information they have collected.

The overwhelming majority of information being saved is unstructured. Unstructured data is far more challenging to manage, maintain, and access than information stored in traditional databases.

According to IDC, data generation is increasing by roughly 20% every year. Unstructured data accounts for 92.8% of all data in 2024.  IDC also estimates that 80% of the information in organizational data archives is “cold data” which is infrequently accessed.

Many organizations use outdated storage or poorly maintained archival systems. Their data controls often perform poorly. They risk unauthorized data disclosure, are unable to use their archives effectively, and many of their archived records become corrupted, orphaned, or inaccessible.

Managing data with an intelligent tiered approach is a common way to meet these challenges. An additional option, also available in tiered storage, is to utilize object storage with its metadata and tagging options. Utilizing object storage will add virtually unlimited scalability.

Data generation is growing exponentially and the need or desire to archive unstructured data is growing, too. Reliable and affordable archive storage solutions are a crucial component and should be considered now to avoid costly security, productivity and integrity issues down the road.