Dark data, mostly unstructured, grows many times faster than structured business data. It is retained by enterprises by deploying huge storage, backup, and management infrastructure. However, enterprises find extracting value from these clutters a challenge. This article titled “Illuminate the dark data to make the big digital leap” published as part of the IDG Contributor Network explores object storage solutions. In addition, the article explains why it will help enterprises overcome the many IT and business challenges associated with dark data.
Today, there is a need to curate the diverse mix of content in disparate formats such as audio, video, PDFs, social feeds, IVRs and emails in a secure repository.. This repository should be accessible across multiple users, applications, and workloads on-premise or cloud. Enterprises can meet these requirements by leveraging object storage solutions.
Object storage enables enterprises to deal with the drastic growth of data and at the same time improving ease of use, providing flexibility to scale capacity and performance independently to address provisioning management issues, and meet a variety of workloads. Object storage solutions have fewer limitations vis-à-vis other data storage methods. Designed for usage at the application level, users can access it from any device, anytime from anywhere.
How do object storage solutions help in overcoming the challenges associated with dark data? Enterprises should consider an object storage solution as a big data reservoir or scalable and centralized data hub. This enables analytics-based applications to blend structured and unstructured data, which includes dark data, together for business intelligence and visualization workloads. Furthermore, object storage solutions attach custom metadata to files as a form of detailed enrichment. This gives unstructured data more context and makes it easier to discover and search. What’s more, by facilitating the blending of unstructured and structured data, object storage solutions enable the creation of a more complete set of data. The completed set improves the enterprise’s ability to gain more relevant insights, which provides higher business value.
To gather insight from data including dark data, enterprises should focus on building a distributed object storage system that can evolve and scale according to future requirements. Object storage solutions with its optimized infrastructure, multiple storage tiers and configurable attributes, can create virtual content platforms that can be subdivided for better organization of content, policies, and access.
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