Dive Brief:
- More than half of enterprise leaders say unstructured data mostly stays in a silo, and less than half of information actually gets shared between employees or systems, according to IDC data published last week. The report, sponsored by Box, surveyed 400 IT leaders.
- For 2 in 5 enterprise leaders, the majority of the data their company stores is used only once, then left unaccessed.
- Idle data brings higher costs, according to the analysis. Costs associated with security breaches double for companies with more unstructured data, IDC found.
Dive Insight:
Data fuels IT ambitions. That includes the recent generative AI wave and more traditional digital tools, such as personalized recommendation engines in e-commerce or critical financial forecasts.
Without proper data to fuel analytics systems, organizations won't reap the full benefits of their IT estate. This effort includes finding ways to properly structure data and put it to use.
IDC found companies that used their unstructured data in the past 12 months cited improved customer satisfaction, data governance and regulatory compliance, among other positive outcomes, according to the study.
Enterprise reliance on SaaS and other digital solutions led to the proliferation of data sources. Migration to the cloud drove the availability of data past the analytics tools of the average company, according to a Coleman Parkes study published last year.
Nearly 3 in 4 leaders said data management was a challenge, Coleman Parkes found, and almost all executives struggled to extend observability and security across environments.
