Your unstructured data might seem like a mystery to you, but managing it has never been easier thanks to the cloud. Here's what you should do with your data.

For IT professionals, dealing with the amount of unstructured data required to support operations can be a challenge.

And while leveraging cloud storage to handle the needs of your company or clients can be a great solution, there are a number of issues too. Archiving, protecting, managing and recovering data can be challenging without the right cloud-based solution.

Supporting network infrastructure means effectively managing storage, networking, and data center operations with a solution that is secure. Your data needs to be accessible too.

Unfortunately, with so many providers on the market competing for business it is sometimes difficult to choose the best solution. We all know that when handled properly, cloud solutions can be a huge benefit.

But how do you choose? We've put together this guide to help you every step of the way.

But first, let's underscore the importance of managing unstructured data for the health of your organization or clients.

Here we go:

The Importance of Unstructured Data

We all know the 4 V's of Big Data:

• Volume
• Variety
• Veracity
• Velocity

And we can add in the 5th V of Value. The variety in big data is represented oftentimes by the unstructured data your organization needs to collect and use.

The most common categories of data that are unstructured include:

• Videos
• Social media
• Machine-generated
• Documents
• Email

Helping the data collection and analysis activities of any organization today requires tracking unstructured data.

Without the ability to collect and interpret unstructured data assets, organization risk becoming stuck behind the times.

Measuring ROI, completing market research, understanding trends, and monitoring internal activities requires an unstructured data solution.

Video is the biggest internet trend for 2017. Video content will represent 74% of all internet traffic in 2017.

Unstructured data is a major component of any data solution.

What Your Company and Clients Need for Unstructured Data

Data collection is changing so fast it's important to stay ahead of the curve. The fact that social media, video, and email are so essential to every aspect of operations isn't news.

But integrating this storage into overall infrastructure can be. As a result, some IT professionals choose a system that doesn't have a broad enough foundation to grow with their changing needs.

For a successful data solution, you need to focus on search, analytics, security, and data governance. Here's why:

Search

Your search capabilities for data that is unstructured are often a larger issue than your other data needs. With such variety, you'll require a unique solution.

This begins with archiving data through the backup process. A good cloud solution will reduce backup costs.

An optimum solution will reduce the storage footprint on your primary storage. Then, optimizing your data by removing duplicates, applying compression, and keeping track of versions will make any search a snap.

Analytics

Data analysis needs to include the various types you are collecting as well. Overall data analysis should have the ability to consider your storage footprint and isolate risks and identify opportunities.

Look for these essential analytics capabilities:

• Data classification
• Access rights analysis
• Storage cost analysis
• Data usage activity

Beyond the analytics tasks of ROI and data analysis, you should be able to use tools to analyze your storage solution as well.

These analytics will also include threats and security issues.

Security

Every IT professional knows the importance in maintaining optimum security for your networking, infrastructure, and data collection needs. Unfortunately, when it comes to data that is unstructured, we often neglect typical security protocol.

Not every solution for data that is unstructured is created the same. Somehow the types of collection that include emails or social media can seem less integral to overall security.

This can be a costly mistake.

When searching for a data solution it should include security from:

• Ransomware
• Insider threats
• Data loss

Without this level of security, your overall big data solution is lacking.

Disaster Recovery and Encryption

Premier solutions will include 3 ensuring synchronous copies of your data are stored and encrypted in a data center of your own choosing.

You may also want to look for capabilities that can also create shadow copies in a backup account. Some solutions will employ storage redundancy that syncs copies to a second datacenter as well.

You'll want the ability to encrypt with your own key before sending to the cloud as well. This provides absolute security.

And you'll want to be able to control your data and protect access and overall governance.

Data Governance

It's not enough to keep data that is unstructured secure from outside threats. You need to be able to control access, storage, and overall governance as well.

The best solutions are scalable to include these requirements too. They can have multiple storage accounts in one or more regions.

Write Once Ready Many (WORM) solutions are essential for handling data that is unstructured as well.

Beyond the security applications, and protecting the validity of your data collection efforts, WORM will allow you to handle data governance from a central hub.

Sharing data and data access can make your organization and clients faster, more adaptable, and streamlined. But without WORM solutions you won't be able to provide the overall data governance and management you need.

Finding a solution that answers all of your needs can be a challenge, but they are out there. There are ways to have it all in one place.

The Best Data Solutions Have It All

HubStor can help.

For IT professionals looking for ways they can leverage the cloud to store and manage data, HubStor is the answer.

Unfortunately, cloud storage gateways like Nasuni, Panzura, Amazon Glacier, and StorSimple are lacking. They do not offer the search, analytics, security, and data governance they need to succeed.

HubStor provides all these benefits and more.

HubStor Is the Answer

Did you know that HubStor is a cloud storage solution that lets enterprises leverage public cloud storage for all the data workloads that they wouldn't put into a file sharing service like DropBox?

We handle a wide range of needs. This includes surveillance video, medical imaging, project archives, geospatial data, log files, machine-generated data, legacy archives, data relating to a litigation, and a number of other data requirements.

Don't wait another day to begin implementing the best solution for your company and your clients.

Contact HubStor now and find out how the best cloud solutions will answer your unstructured data needs.