Unstructured data, the documents, files, audio and video that don’t fit well into structured database rows and columns, is growing at an incredible pace across enterprises.
In a recent report from the Taneja Group consulting firm titled “Next Generation File Management and Controls Market Overview”, 218 IT users across a variety of industries described the amount of unstructured data in their workplace. 73 percent said that more than 60 percent of their data is unstructured, 53 percent said that their environment has more than 11 terabytes of data, and 62 percent said that their data is increasing any where from 16% to 75% per year.
Many IT groups are being taxed with trying to come up with ways to manage all of that data. Typically storage devices are being thrown at the problem to create a solution, but instead, what often results are islands of storage that become scattered throughout the enterprise.
The many faces of ECM offer a number of solutions to the problem that include enterprise serach and centralized enterprise content management solutions. Another option is a virtualized file systems which allow the consolidation of many file servers into a single virtual device. Rather than try to set up file servers on a departmental basis, centralized solutions are easier to manage and encourage the sharing of information between groups.
Virtual File Systems also act as a sort of entry-level ECM system. Once organization begin to see the value in shared information, they often move up to more featured systems to help them manage and sort through their structured data.
