56% of organizations see moving more data to the cloud as their top priority with unstructured data, underscoring the importance of data management, according to a new report by Komprise.

Unstructured data is growing in ways that are becoming troublesome for the enterprise, stretching the limits of storage devices and comprising increasingly larger chunks of the IT budget. It’s easy for some large companies with big budgets to keep on buying storage — but that may not be the smartest way out. IT organizations need a data management strategy to be competitive.

Among the key findings is that companies are dealing with sky-high data growth and a related growth in spending. 63% of companies are already managing over 1PB of data with 30%+ IT budgets spent on data storage and backups — and most organizations expect these costs to go up in 2021. Companies are realizing that more efficient ways to manage data is becoming critical.

The data also tells us that hybrid cloud environments are dominating. Half of enterprises have data stored in a mix of on-premises and cloud-based storage and nearly half will spend more than 50% of IT budgets on cloud data storage in the next two years. Hybrid cloud brings flexibility but also new mandates for unstructured data management. The top enterprise data management goals include visibility to plan better and curbing the rise in storage and backup costs.

We’re seeing a systematic approach to unstructured data management, too. The majority (70%) of IT directors report having challenges with unstructured data management including high storage and backup costs, lack of management tools, lack of visibility and no plans to monetize data. As a result, the top new approaches and investments cited are to create systematic policies for data management (56%) and invest in analytics tools (45%).

And finally, other data management areas of interest for the future include tagging data for future use, improving search, enabling data lakes and understanding anomalies and trends for better security and ransomware detection.

To ascertain current thinking about data management, Komprise surveyed 320 IT and storage professionals at midsize to large enterprises across the United States and the UK, in June.

Read the full report by Komprise.