Unstructured data and its importance to businesses

When businesses all have excellent personnel, the most advanced technology and good products, what will make each business make a difference and make a breakthrough in its field? Many leaders of large corporations in the world have the same answer, that is "data" and how each business exploits that data, will give each business decisions. Smarter and more accurate business is the key to opening opportunities for business success.

According to John Roese, CTO of Dell Technologies: "For the first time in history, we not only have a large and varied amount of data, but people are also inventing new and more economical ways. The most important thing today is that software and algorithms have reached a threshold - mainly through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) - that We can dig deep into the data we have and turn it into interesting, useful information for business and life.

There is a hierarchy in the data. The first is the "Data" level - Data, when everything is raw, unplanned and untapped. Next level, we have "Information" - Information, when data is organized in the form of structures. Further, we can get "Knowledge" - Knowledge, from finding insights from previous information.

And finally, "Wisdom" - Wisdom, obtained when we turn knowledge into predictions for the future, into understanding the past and into practical actions to achieve a certain goal. . We are entering an era where Technology infrastructure, data volumes as well as software algorithms come together and give people "Knowledge" and "Wisdom" in almost everything. all professions. I think these are enough to prove that we are entering a new era - the Data Age."

Unstructured data and its importance to businesses Picture 1

The world is facing an extremely powerful data explosion in recent years, according to IDC, the total amount of data worldwide by 2025 could reach 175 Zettabytes (175 billion Terabytes). In fact, breakthrough new technologies like 5G are the premise for many businesses to provide more high-end services to their customers, in order to take advantage of the power of the 5G network, and this has helped so many new types of data will be generated and processed at the edge instead of in a centralized data center. According to Gartner predictions, by 2025 about 75% of data will be generated and processed outside of centralized data centers.

This spike in data is driven by one group of data, 'unstructured data', which currently accounts for 80% of total capacity worldwide and is predicted to grow by a factor of two. 3 times in 2023. Structured data, which is a very familiar group of data, are data types that are typically located in relational databases and can be queried via SQL statements (eg Oracle). DB, IBM DB2, MS SQL, etc…).

Unstructured data is all the rest of the data, such as text files, emails, videos, photos, mobile data, social media data, data from sensors, satellite images, etc… this is a group of data that cannot be stored in rows and columns like structured data and cannot be mined using traditional data query techniques.

Unstructured data and its importance to businesses Picture 2

With 80% of all data available today, it's clear that unstructured data holds untapped business-critical information and "insights".

Structured data is very important, unstructured data plays a key role in creating breakthroughs for businesses by providing a wealth of information and knowledge that statistical results can not be found. normally through structured data can't deliver. Therefore, it is imperative for businesses and organizations to find methods to manage and analyze unstructured data in order to make important business decisions, as a basis for creating competitive advantages. in the market, especially in the current data era.

Understanding the difficulties and challenges in managing and analyzing unstructured data, Dell Technologies always accompanies businesses through solutions in the UDS - Unstructured Data Solution group including: PowerScale (NAS) , ECS (Object Storage) and SDP (Streaming Data Platform).

Isabella Humphrey

Update 25 November 2021