Disaster Recovery Journal Winter 2025

EDITOR’S NOTE : DCIG empowers the IT industry with actionable analysis that equips individuals within organizations to do supplier and product evaluations. DCIG delivers informed, insightful, third-party analysis, and commentary on IT technology. As industry experts, DCIG provides comprehensive, in-depth analysis, and recommendations of various enterprise data storage and data protection technologies. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in all Disaster Recovery Journal articles belong solely to the author. The information, product recommendations, and opinions in this article are based upon public information and from sources DCIG, LLC. believes to be accurate and reliable.

for machine-generated data, telemetry data, video surveillance data, and data sourced from the internet. These create burgeoning petabyte-scale unstructured data stores that require organizations to tackle data protection differently. Backup Often Breaks When Protecting Unstructured Data Backup software meets many organizations’ recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) at a reasonable price point. However, today’s unstructured data stores change the dynamics of data protection for at least three reasons. 1. Unstructured data often

Burgeoning Unstructured Data Stores Demand Organizations Tackle Data Protection Differently By JEROME WENDT E very organization possesses and manages unstructured data somewhere in its IT infrastructure. Unfortunately, many do not know how much they have or even where it resides. Further, more organizations now plan to adopt and implement artificial intelligence (AI) that will create new unstructured data management and protection challenges. Unstructured data now comes from multiple sources. Emails and files generated by humans may now only represent a small percentage of the data. Organizations may now also need to account

scales into the petabytes (PBs), which significantly increases backup costs . Backing up unstructured data may introduce significant backup costs, potentially $150/TB or more. These costs include additional backup software costs plus the need to acquire and manage more backup infrastructure. Data change rates and backup

26 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | WINTER 2025