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« IBM to Acquire Cognos: What's the Deal With That? | Main | Looking Back at BI -- From the Year 2018 » November 26, 2007A Lot of Unstructured Data Out There
In a survey of 238 IT decision-makers in North American and Great Britain, the Taneja Group found that 53 percent of the respondents had 11 terabytes or more of unstructured data. That's a lot of data that falls outside the limits of databases and other data management environments. Paul Weinberg provides details on the study in a recent blog post. Sixty-two percent of the respondents indicated that their unstructured data was growing between 16 and 75 percent a year. The major drivers for unstructured data growth among survey respondents are Microsoft Office (78 percent), email attachments (66 percent), and backup and archival (81 percent). The challenge, Taneja analysts said, was to provide centralized security and control of the data, while leaving the data physically in place. Technology approaches to managing unstructured data include file virtualization, WAN optimization, WAFS, clustered storage, distributed file systems, and network file management. However, most unstructured data is likely to be left alone for the foreseeable future, Steve Norall, senior analyst and consultant at the Taneja Group, is quoted as saying. Perhaps one of the greatest challenges to effective business intelligence and analytics is being able to capture these more serendipitous sources of knowledge. In fact, this has given rise to an entire industry, the content management and knowledge management sector. However, perhaps only a small percentage of these unstructured files are relevant to operations at hand. How can we sift through and distinguish what's relevant, and what's superfluous? That's the next frontier of BI. Posted by joemckendrick in Data Management | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: |
