Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Steve Leeper, VP of Product Marketing, Datadobi
The growth of unstructured data (up to 80-90% of a company’s data) will continue to accelerate in 2025. Businesses face a pivotal challenge: transforming vast, scattered data into actionable insights.
The power of data insights
With the acceleration in the growth of unstructured data, the need for insights is greater than ever. Insights are key for managing the lifecycle of data from creation to archiving. Insights are also key for ensuring the most appropriate data is included in data lakes and data lakehouses that support new workloads in the AI/ML space. It’s not good enough to blindly copy data into a repository that will be used to train or augment a model. Only businesses that can confidently say their data is GenAI-ready, will succeed.
One-stop shop to manage hybrid environments
The amount of unstructured data stored in both public cloud and private cloud environments will continue to grow. The impact of unstructured data management solutions that give customers the ability to manage data no matter where it is located will increase as the data in multiple environments accumulates. It’s no longer realistic to ignore the fact that, in most organizations, data lives in a hybrid environment and global data management is required.
Don’t be late to the party
The adoption of Unstructured Data Management solutions will continue to increase in 2025 as customers struggle with cost increases caused by endless storage expansion, higher cloud storage consumption, new workload adoption, increasing regulations, and ever-growing data protection requirements.
A data management plan for 2025 will allow companies to maximize their data value, reduce costs, and mitigate risk. It also prepares an organization’s data for GenAI and other future digital strategies, where clean, curated data is the most important first step. Companies that can manage unstructured data effectively across hybrid environments will be able to unlock hidden value, giving them a competitive edge by turning their data into a strategic advantage.
##
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Leeper oversees the market development for Datadobi and manages the Presales Sales Engineers team globally. A 30-year veteran of IT, Steve has held a variety of technical and sales roles at Andersen Consulting, Sun Microsystems, and EMC.
