Enterprise IT Builds AI Infrastructure on Budget

Komprise, Inc. announces the results of its 2024 State of Unstructured Data Management survey.

The 4^th annual survey finds that most (70%) of enterprises are still experimenting with AI and “preparing for AI” remains a top storage and data management priority for IT leaders. Yet leaders said that cost optimization is an even higher priority this year and they are trying to fit AI into existing IT budgets. Only 30% say they will increase their IT budgets to support AI projects.

Other highlights from the survey include a priority on building out the proper infrastructure and technology stack for AI by upgrading storage and data management technologies and creating AI-ready infrastructure. Addressing security and governance gaps across unstructured data management, GenAI and the IT workforce and moving data without disruption are other top trends of 2024.

As the start-up community and established technology vendors alike rush to launch new products and capabilities for AI, enterprise IT is still laying the infrastructure foundation and determining the necessary economics to get started.

The survey, conducted by a 3rd party, gathered inputs from 300 global enterprise storage IT and business decision makers at companies with more than 1,000 employees in the US.

Highlights of the Survey:

• Nearly 50% of enterprises are storing more than 5PB of unstructured data and nearly 30% have more than 10PB.
• The top priorities for storage in the next year include cost optimization (54%), preparing for AI (51%) and investing in data management and data mobility (41%).
• As in 2023, moving data without disruption to users/apps is the top technical unstructured data management challenge (54%), followed by using AI to classify and segment data (48%).
• Prepping for AI is the top business challenge for unstructured data management (57%).
• Only 13% restrict what corporate data can be used in AI, while 31% have no restrictions for users, apps or data in AI.
• Nearly half (44%) are creating AI-ready infrastructure and 32% are building their own learning models.
• Only 30% are increasing the IT budget to support AI projects.
• The leading challenge in preparing data for AI is managing governance/security concerns (45%), followed by data classification and tagging (41%).
• The leading tactic to address AI data concerns is to upgrade storage/data management technologies (53%).
• AI data governance/security is the top future capability (47%) for unstructured data management, up from 28% in 2023.
• Nearly 60% need more staff with skills related to security, compliance and sensitive data.

“Our latest survey reveals a pivotal moment in enterprise IT as organizations grapple with the transformative potential of AI while balancing fiscal responsibility,” says Kumar Goswami, CEO and co-founder of Komprise. “IT leaders will also need to factor in critical data governance and security capabilities. Managing unstructured data strategically to optimize costs and use data workflows to enrich metadata is a great place to start an AI initiative.“