How to manage the data explosion in 2015

Data is growing faster than most of us know how to deal with. In our Data Health Check 2014, file data was listed as the fastest area of growth within UK organisations, but also the most important data type to recover in a disaster.

The problem is, no one really understands their data. A file that you edited yesterday is probably a lot more valuable to you than one that hasn't been accessed since last year – but file data is so unstructured that it's almost impossible to make that distinction. In fact, two thirds of the 400 IT decision makers we questioned admitted that they had no idea which of their data was active and which hadn't been accessed in the last 12 months.

What surprised us though, is that if the majority of UK organisations are struggling with growing storage costs, why are only 13% using data analytics tools to take back control of their data? If you can distinguish between active and inactive data – you can archive your unused files (that you might still need to keep hold of for compliance reasons) onto much cheaper storage than the high-performance storage your critical files are kept on.

The truth is, a lot of your unstructured data probably has little or no value to your business – but what about the data that does? Who has the time or resources to manage or, even better, actually benefit from it? This is the reason we have been developing a tool to help manage this data problem. The product is called Kazoup.

We use Kazoup in our offices. Like any organisation, we have a lot of data - and that can be quite daunting if you're tasked with cleaning it up. But Kazoup's reporting presents data really quite beautifully – we put as much effort into design as we do technology.

Most importantly, though, it allows us to make sense of our data. We know which data is active and therefore a priority to restore, we can see which files we can afford to stick on low-cost object storage should we ever need them for an audit, and we can easily see what we're able to delete to free up valuable storage space.

Kazoup is still in public beta at the moment, and you can try it out for free at www.kazoup.com.