Essential Guide

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Editor's note

Growth of the global datasphere is out of control. IDC predicted it will climb from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025. All that data will easily overwhelm storage resources, industry experts say, and effective data management will be vital to ensure the data can be accessed and productively used, rather than stashed away and forgotten.

Use this essential guide to catch up on the particular data management challenges surrounding unstructured data, IoT data and data in cloud environments, where IDC said about half of all data will live in 2025. We also take a look at the state of storage data classification and tiering, a key element in effective data management.

1Unstructured data's new reality

It used to be that data was structured and relatively easy to manage or unstructured and not so easy to manage. With the emergence of machine-generated semi-structured data, however, the line is blurring. Discover what this change means for effective data management and how some organizations and vendors are dealing with this new reality.

2The IoT data quandary

IoT is generating an enormous amount of data, but only a small portion of it can be stored. This situation will only worsen over time, creating huge challenges for effectively managing all that data. The following articles explore the IoT storage burden at the edge and offer insight into how to capitalize on the visibility and insight IoT data provides.

3What's next with cloud data management?

Placing, managing, searching and storing data in the cloud -- or, increasingly, in multiple clouds -- are difficult tasks. The articles below outline how some vendors and enterprises are tackling issues that arise when dealing with the cloud and effective data management.

4Are data classification and tiering still relevant?

Not long ago, as all-flash emerged in enterprise storage, it appeared that tiered storage -- moving aging data from higher-performing, more expensive storage to lower-performing, less expensive media -- might disappear. But storage tiering is needed more than ever now that SSDs come in a range of price-performance pairings and the cloud provides a cost-effective option. Find out where storage tiering technology is headed.