Today, most enterprise data doesn’t come in tidy rows and columns. Instead, businesses manage vast volumes of unstructured data – files, images, videos, documents, logs, research data and more. According to industry sources, unstructured data often comprises 80 – 90% of an organisation’s total data footprint.
That growth has a downside. Without a clear data management strategy, unstructured data can lead to unchecked storage costs, inefficient backups, compliance risk and poor visibility. Worse still, when you do attempt to unlock its value, for AI, analytics or compliance, the chaos often undermines your efforts.
That’s why unstructured data management (UDM) matters. A solution like Komprise allows organisations to discover, classify, analyse, tier, migrate and govern unstructured data, turning it from a cost liability into a strategic asset.
Here’s a deeper look at some industry use cases where unstructured data management delivers clear value, whether to reduce costs, enable AI, strengthen compliance or modernise infrastructure.
Healthcare – Cutting Costs Without Sacrificing Access
Healthcare is arguably one of the most data-intensive industries. From medical imaging and diagnostics to clinical records, hospital networks produce massive volumes of unstructured data. Over time, the storage and backup costs escalate, especially when much of the data becomes “cold” or rarely accessed.
One large health system handling over 16 PB of NAS storage used unstructured data management to analyse and archive cold data into cloud storage. The outcome: more than 2 PB of data moved off expensive primary storage, delaying costly hardware refreshes, all while ensuring clinicians retain access to historical patient data when needed.
Importantly, unstructured data management provides compliance-ready visibility and auditing, critical when dealing with sensitive patient records and data retention regulations.
Life Sciences & Genomics – Turning Research Data Chaos into Research Acceleration
Biotech and life sciences organisations generate massive volumes of data: instrument outputs, high-resolution images (e.g. TIFs), genomic sequences, lab logs, etc. These are often stored across multiple silos, with little visibility into what’s old vs active, or accessed vs stale.
Using unstructured data management, one biotech company migrated legacy data to a central NAS array, then applied cloud-tiering to archive stale data while keeping research pipelines active. The result: better storage efficiency, improved performance for active datasets, and a scalable platform ready for future workloads.
For labs and research houses, this means infrastructure can keep pace with demands, without overprovisioning storage or risking bottlenecks.
Financial Services – Clean, Governed Data Sets for AI, Compliance & Efficiency
Financial services is heavily regulated. Data sprawl over decades of operations, legacy file shares, and decentralised control makes compliance and governance a headache. Add AI-driven tools (e.g. for risk modelling, fraud detection) and you need clean, governed, and current datasets.
One global insurance firm used unstructured data management to tier 600 TB+ of data to lower-cost object cloud storage, simultaneously cleaning and classifying data for AI-readiness. By doing so, they reduced primary storage costs, strengthened compliance controls, and laid the groundwork for reliable AI workflows.
The ability to classify, tag, and govern unstructured data before ingestion helps ensure AI models aren’t built on outdated or redundant data, improving accuracy, reliability and compliance.
Public Sector / Government – Extend Infrastructure Life & Strengthen Oversight
Public sector organisations often face limited budgets, ageing hardware, and strict regulatory/compliance requirements. Many also handle diverse data types: CAD files, GIS data, document archives, surveillance footage, reports, and more.
Unstructured data management helps extend the life of legacy storage infrastructures by identifying cold or unused data and archiving it to lower-cost storage tiers, often cloud-based, while preserving accessibility and audit trails.
Moreover, for agencies bound by retention laws or data governance mandates, the visibility and metadata tracking provided by UDM ensures compliance without adding friction for end users.
Engineering & Architecture Firms – Reduce Storage Footprint, Improve Data Access
Engineering and architecture firms generate large volumes of CAD, GIS, 3D modelling and project documentation, often across distributed teams and legacy storage systems. These files tend to accumulate rapidly, especially after M&A activity or mergers.
One global firm, managing over 6 PB of data, implemented unstructured data management to identify project data older than three years for archiving. Cold data was moved to object storage (e.g. cloud archive), freeing up high-performance storage for active work, while ensuring legacy files remained accessible when needed.
This not only optimised cost and performance, but also helped the firm reduce data silos and improve cross-team access, enabling the reuse of historical data and improving project efficiency.
Energy & Resources – Centralise Remote Data, Drive Compliance and Cost Efficiency
Energy, oil/gas, and resource companies often operate across remote sites – offshore rigs, mining fields, inspection sites, etc. These generate a wide array of unstructured data: sensor logs, inspection reports, drone imagery/video, compliance documentation, maintenance logs, etc.
Unstructured data management enables these firms to retire edge storage hardware, centralise data in cloud object storage, and enforce consistent governance and compliance across the entire network.
Beyond compliance, this also reduces storage costs, simplifies data access, improves accountability (via chargebacks or departmental reporting), and prepares unstructured data for AI-based predictive maintenance, digital twins, and analytics workflows.
Semiconductor & High-Tech Manufacturing – Protect IP, Cut Storage Footprint
High-tech manufacturers, semiconductors, and R&D firms frequently produce proprietary data – design files, imaging outputs, test logs – often highly sensitive and regulated. The challenge: how to retain access without excessive storage costs.
One global semiconductor company implemented a policy to tier cold or inactive data (e.g. older than 12 months) from performance storage to object/cloud storage, while preserving metadata, access history, and symbolic links. This preserved compliance and IP protection, reduced reliance on expensive primary NAS, and maintained data availability for engineers and auditors.
With unstructured data management, high-value organisations get both data safety and cost efficiency – a combination often hard to achieve in legacy storage models.
Why These Use Cases Matter: Common Themes
Across these industries, several recurring themes emerge and they point to why unstructured data management isn’t a luxury, but a necessity:
- Storage cost optimisation & lifecycle management: Most organisations are paying for high-performance storage long after data becomes cold or rarely accessed. UDM helps right-place data, reducing TCO significantly.
- Data visibility & governance: Silos, legacy storage and unknown data estates create compliance, security and audit risks. With UDM, organisations get a global view and metadata-rich inventory across NAS, object, cloud and hybrid environments.
- Support for AI/data analytics: Unstructured data powers modern analytics and AI but only when it’s organised. UDM enables classification, tagging, duplication removal, and sensitive data filtering, laying the foundation for trusted AI workflows.
- Flexibility and vendor-agnostic storage strategy: Because UDM is storage-agnostic, organisations can avoid vendor lock-in, migrate data flexibly and integrate on-prem, cloud and hybrid storage strategies without disruption.
Turning Data Burden into Opportunity
At IDS, we’ve seen how unstructured data challenges derails infrastructure budgets, slows down innovation and increases compliance risk, especially for ANZ organisations facing growth and regulatory pressures.
By partnering with Komprise, we offer a holistic solution that helps companies across industries:
- Gain full visibility into their unstructured data estates
- Optimise storage costs without compromising accessibility
- Prepare data for AI, analytics, and regulatory compliance
- Enable scalable, flexible data workflows across on-premises and cloud environments
Whether you’re a hospital, energy provider, financial services firm or manufacturing organisation, smart unstructured data management can transform legacy data liabilities into strategic assets.
Unstructured Data Doesn’t Have to Be a Problem, It Can Be Your Competitive Advantage
Data growth shows no sign of slowing down, especially unstructured data. Left unmanaged, this growth erodes budgets, increases risk and stifles innovation.
But with the right unstructured data management strategy and the right toolset (like Komprise), organisations can reclaim control. From cost savings to compliance, from AI readiness to infrastructure modernisation – proper management turns data into fuel for growth.
If you’d like to explore how IDS and Komprise can help your organisation take control of unstructured data – reach out.
With the right strategy, unstructured data becomes more than a storage burden, it becomes a competitive advantage.
