When you’ve got terabytes of data, you don’t want to spend your time managing storage itself.
We’ve talked a lot about the sheer volume of unstructured data being created these days. The long and short of it is, unstructured data doubles every few years and by 2025 it’s expected to hit 175 zettabytes.
Even if your organization doesn’t produce anywhere near that much unstructured data, you’re likely still sitting on an overwhelming amount of data. The challenge that a lot of people are facing these days is how do you manage all that, without getting lost in the weeds.
In situations like this, it’s easy to focus too much on where you’re storing the data and not looking closely enough at the data itself. That’s where data visibility comes in.
Data Visibility – What is it and Why Does it Matter?
Data visibility is how easily you can sort, manage, and monitor the data that you have stored, regardless of where it is. The big reason this matters is that when you have unstructured data stored across a variety of platforms and business units in your organization, figuring out what’s where, whether or not the data is accurate, or even if there’s something causing issues in your system can be impossible, especially when you’re looking at the huge amounts of data mentioned above.
The best way to do this is with a system that helps you manage your data across all platforms and offers integrated analytics. This gives a way to watch how your data is growing and what’s going on with the data. It also helps you better understand your security needs are and will be, based on usage habits.
Ultimately, the more you know about details like this, the easier it is to troubleshoot issues, increase storage needs, and learn exactly what your data is being used for.
How Metadata Helps Manage Files
Metadata is information that is created about the files, like where it came from, who’s using it, how many times it’s been accessed, etc. This data helps us sort through the data that is captured within your organization and find what we’re looking for when we need it.
The problem, though, is that when you’re dealing with millions of files, you can’t create or access the metadata easily. Think about it this way. You’re trying to find all the files attached to Project X, but those files fill 550 gigabytes on a cloud server owned by the sales team, who isn’t just storing data for Project X on those servers. Even gaining access to that data could be a challenge if data silos exist in your business, never mind the amount of time it’s going to take to manually review the metadata to find the files you’re looking for.
When you have data visibility, you can automatically catalog the metadata in a database in real time. You have a better understanding of what’s going on and, more importantly, you don’t have to crawl through everything yourself. You can get your answers in seconds with a quick query.
Gaining the Visibility You Need
The best way to get full visibility over your data is with a data management tool that helps you manage your unstructured data across a variety of platforms and provides dashboards that helps you manage everything.
A platform like this removes all the guesswork. If something’s going wrong with your data transfers, you can use the dashboard to see where in the transfer the issue is. It could be as simple as finding one file that’s causing the problems. But, if you don’t have that visibility, you may never find that particular needle in the data haystack.
On top of that, some platforms allow you to do API calls using a third-party system that helps you understand the context of the data that you’re looking at.
Want Greater Visibility Into Your Unstructured Data?
The good news is that Qumulo can give you unparalleled visibility into your unstructured data. We provide an agnostic solution that lets you access your files, no matter what platform they’re being stored on.
Contact Chi today to learn more about whether or not Qumulo is right for you.
Originally published on the Qumulo Blog, by Devin Helms, October 5, 2022
