Key Takeaways:
– Unstructured data growth is a significant challenge for organizations due to its size, growth rate, and management complexities.
– Katten Law, a global law firm, manages a staggering volume of such data with an annual growth rate of 20-25%.
– The firm recently switched to an unstructured data management solution from Komprise to efficiently archive and recover data.
– Komprise’s solution provides added benefits by allowing time-based archiving and offering improved security against ransomware attacks.
– Katten Law has successfully moved part of its storage to Microsoft Azure BLOB store contributing to cost-efficient transitions and enhanced data access speed.
Navigating the Unstructured Data Labyrinth
Unstructured data, an amalgamation of text, images, videos, and PDFs has been transforming into a formidable challenge for many organizations worldwide. As per IDC’s Global Datasphere study, the planet is forecasted to generate over 163 Zettabytes (ZB) of data by 2025. This massive amount of raw data is far beyond the world’s current storage capacity of just about 13ZB across all mediums. Furthermore, the regulation and security considerations add another dimension to this complex puzzle.
Coping with the Data Avalanche
Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP (Katten Law), a leading global law firm, has been grappling with this challenge head-on. The firm, with its network of 700 attorneys globally, juggles with hundreds of millions of documents of clients’ cases spanning across decades. The company stores approximately 240 Terabytes (TB) of data, witnessing a growth rate of 20-25% each year.
Leveraging New Solutions for Data Management
Previously, Katten Law managed its burgeoning unstructured data through an in-house archival system. However, operational issues prompted the firm to explore more effective solutions. Enter Komprise, a leading proponent of unstructured data management solutions.
Komprise’s different approach to managing data appealed strongly to Alexander Diaz, the firm’s infrastructure and datacenter operations director. Unlike many archive solutions that use a ‘stub’ in the production file system to denote the archived data, Komprise leverages a ‘symbolic link’. Diaz asserts that even if the symbolic link is lost or damaged, one can effortlessly find the original file or program.
Improving Data Retention Practices
Komprise’s software also offers time-based archiving, a useful feature for a law firm like Katten Law. Traditional archive packages automatically archive files based on a set timeframe of inactivity. However, in the legal realm, cases might lie dormant for periods, only to be revived later. Komprise’s solution meticulously archives files associated with a case when it is closed officially than some arbitrary period of inactivity.
Boosting Data Security and Cost-efficiency
Katten Law, in its bid to transition primary storage platforms from traditional disks to flash storage, found Komprise’s data management solution beneficial. Not only did it help reduce costs while transitioning to faster primary storage, but it also mitigated security risks drastically.
According to Diaz, utilizing Komprise’s solution has considerably minimized their exposure to ransomware or hacker threats. Archived files are essentially immune to security events as they remain inaccessible to external threats.
With unstructured data growth poised to skyrocket in the coming years, novel solutions like Komprise’s are increasingly becoming vital tools for organizations to keep up with data management challenges while maintaining security and cost-efficiency.
