GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Unstructured Data Management (UDM) Solutionsv4.0

1. Executive Summary

Unstructured data—emails, images, videos, documents—now comprises 80% of all enterprise data. This data holds rich insights, but its sheer volume and lack of structure pose significant management challenges. Unstructured data management (UDM) solutions are emerging as the answer, providing organizations with tools to store, organize, analyze, and extract value from this data gold mine.

When evaluating UDM solutions, prospective customers should consider the following:

• Data classification and tagging, to automatically categorize and tag data for easier organization and search.
• Insights and analytics, for extracting meaningful insights from diverse data formats.
• Security and compliance, for providing robust security and compliance with relevant regulations. Robust security features and compliance certifications are essential to protect sensitive data and adhere to industry regulations.
• Scalability and performance, for handling large data volumes efficiently and dealing with future growth. Evaluate processing speed and query latency to ensure efficient analysis and avoid bottlenecks.
• Integration and automation, to enable seamless integration with existing IT infrastructure and automated workflows for streamlined data management.
• Openness and APIs, as open APIs enable customization and integration with other tools and applications, enhancing flexibility and future-proofing the solution.

Business Imperative
C-suite executives are under pressure to gain insights from all data, not just structured formats. UDM solutions can unlock hidden potential in a number of ways:

• Improved decision-making results from the ability to analyze customer behavior, identify operational inefficiencies, and uncover market trends, all fueled by unstructured data insights.
• Enhanced innovation stems from R&D efforts, driven by gathering knowledge from research documents, internal communications, and competitor analysis.
• Reduced costs result from the ability to optimize storage usage, identify and delete redundant data, and automate data lifecycle management for significant cost savings.
• Increased compliance is derived from the ability to ensure data governance and regulatory compliance by effectively managing sensitive information across unstructured data repositories.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a UDM solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a UDM solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 3.6 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a UDM solution is a credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for UDM are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for UDM

This is the fourth year that GigaOm has reported on the UDM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective UDM solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading UDM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.