Tech Expert Q&A: Understanding unstructured data

Mark Benson CTO at Logicalis UKI On-premises answers your questions

What are the pros and cons of on-prem, cloud and hybrid cloud approaches to unstructured data storage? 

The original data environment. For many years, on-premises was the go-to approach for unstructured and structured data storage. This is because on-premises benefits include control, speed, security, governance, and availability.  

However, with total control comes total responsibility and accountability. All staff, including database administrators and analysts, systems administrators, software and network engineers, and cyber security professionals, must create the environment, migrate and upload the data, and install on-premises systems.  

Employees are responsible for ensuring that the underlying infrastructure stays up and runs efficiently, reliably, and securely. The critical risk element here is data handling, migrating, and updating. This means there is a risk of human error. Additionally, on-premises cannot accommodate rapid data activity increases requiring more compute or memory. Essentially, it is more difficult to scale up and down depending on the activity.  

Cloud  

Cloud data storage provides the same benefits that drive organisations to migrate other applications to the cloud. Benefits of cloud data storage include scalability, cost, security, availability, and time to market.   

The challenges with cloud data storage include data integration, lock-in, security, and, possibly, latency. Cloud data storage requires writing ETL code, which consumes time and expensive resources, and introducing any new data source requires more coding. In addition, simply migrating data to a different platform can be arduous, involving technical challenges and contractual and compliance issues. However, third-party ETL tools make this task faster and easier.   

Hybrid Cloud  

Adopting a Hybrid cloud management approach to unstructured data combines private and public cloud environments – with the private cloud environment representing on-site data centres. This means that data and workloads are shared between on-premises and public cloud environments.   

Many organisations will continue to use on-premises infrastructure for the foreseeable future as they find on-premises infrastructure fitting to handle their security, compliance, and regulatory needs. However, much like the rest of us, businesses are continuing to transition to a post-pandemic world – and public cloud environments have leveraged their resources to offer flexibility and openness to meet the unpredictable data needs of enterprises.   

Organisations using hybrid cloud models will need to compete with the aggressively rapid growth of unstructured data, the analytics nightmare of unstructured data, the security risks and data protection, and the rise costs of hybrid structures and human resources required to manage these environments. Such an approach offers many benefits that fit these uncertain times. However, control over unstructured data is far more complicated than structured data.    

Besides on-premises security concerns, public cloud security concerns apply to a hybrid cloud architecture. These concerns include data breaches and potential exposure to malware. And, of course, the sheer amount of data on a hybrid cloud also increases the surface area of cyber-attacks – this is because data is not only on-premises but also on the public cloud. 

What is unstructured data and why is it important? What is the scale of the issue? 

We have well and truly entered the new digital age – and globally, we are now generating, using, and consuming more data than ever before. Unstructured data is increasing massively. It is growing in volume by more than 50% a year, and according to IDC, it will form 80% of all data by 2025 and does so already for some organisations.  

Unstructured data is not actively managed in a transactional system; for example, data that doesn’t live in a relational database management system (RDBMS).   

Unstructured data is becoming essential for business innovation and growth. This is because unstructured data helps businesses improve their customer experience. It offers the key to assisting leaders in getting to know their customers – understanding what trends they value on social media, what opinions they have, and, ultimately, what they want from the brand. Another benefit companies experience by capturing and analysing unstructured data is the ability to see gaps in the market and quickly profit from them before their competitors.   

To summarise, unstructured data provides valuable insights that lead the way for businesses to fill gaps and provide services that meet new customer needs. 

How likely are these newer, hybrid models to succeed and what type of use cases (or indeed industries) are driving take up? 

As we delve deeper into remote and hybrid working models, IT leaders continue developing their digital transformation efforts. Many are embracing hybrid cloud models to scale IT resources to effectively support business-critical applications and workloads. Hybrid cloud has provided them with and will continue providing businesses with the flexibility and efficiencies needed to grow and meet the demands of all users. This is because it is a good platform for building confidence in the cloud, developing a transformation programme on and carrying it out.  

A great example where we continue to see hybrid cloud growth is in the financial services industry. Many FSIs (financial services institutions) are turning to hybrid cloud as it enables them to gain insights into customer behaviour, product efficiency, cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Hybrid cloud can reduce their operating cost and enhance their data security simultaneously by splitting their data between on-premises storage for sensitive data and cloud storage for less sensitive data. This helps FSIs adhere to changing regulatory reporting requirements in multiple operating jurisdictions. These solutions help FSIs conduct liquidity and risk calculations and monitor data to detect fraudulent activity. Ultimately, by using a hybrid cloud, financial service organisations can maintain and support their legacy systems while simultaneously taking advantage of Cloud technology.