Businesses today generate and need plenty of data for business operations, communication, brand promotions, and more. Unfortunately, most of the data organizations generate are unstructured data. These pieces of information come from various sources.
Unstructured data are raw information you cannot easily sort into an organized list. But in today’s scenario, most of the information organizations need and use comes from unstructured data. However, data can accumulate quickly. Thus, it can become a problem. According to various sources, the amounts of data organizations create will be five times larger by 2027, and about 80 percent will be unstructured data.
Managing unstructured data
It will be challenging to store all the raw data your organization collects. The data might not fit into one data storage tier. However, you have several options to ensure you can deal with the deluge of data that will continue to come your way.
- Use a platform
One of the most viable solutions to store unstructured data is to use a data management platform. The system stores unstructured data such as text, audio, videos, images, and other information. It allows you to securely and quickly search, sort, explore and query your data in a more organized order to create and visualize different datasets easily. The platform allows you to sync with your other data storage systems.
- Discard information you do not need
Not all the pieces of data your organization generates and collects are useful. However, they occupy your storage space because they are not organized or structured. So, instead of storing everything, you can use a tool to evaluate the data before you add it to the network. You only store what is valuable for your organization by filtering the information.
- Deduplicate the information
Deduplication (purging) removes or discards identical entries from multiple datasets like mailing lists. For example, a mail distribution company can accumulate huge amounts of duplicate data, leading to the organization spending so much more on storage.
You can have an in-line high-speed deduplication tool to find duplicate records and either keep them for further review or automatically delete them. The savings from using this method varies, but it provides organizations with more storage space for information that is more valuable.
- Tier available data
It is necessary to identify the unstructured data that would be valuable to your organization so that you do not waste money on storage. A larger amount of the data you have can be stored differently. If you employ data tiering, you can automatically assign data to the most suitable storage medium, from cloud to tape or disk to tape. Today, the tape is the most cost-effective medium for data storage. Moreover, you can keep tapes offline, safe from malware attacks.
- Structure your data
Employ machine learning algorithms to find patterns in the unstructured data source. For example, with repeated scanning of documents, the machines can discern if the information provides people’s identities or valuable series of numbers such as phone numbers or Social Security Numbers. The machine can load the semi-structured data into databases, which you can analyze later.
When you have tons of unstructured data to store, choose the most viable storage method that is accessible, cost-effective, and secure.
