It’s already been an exciting and tumultuous year in the IT sector. The latest news that rocked the globe is, of course, about AI and more specifically: DeepSeek and its potentially monumental impact on model training and AI infrastructure. As the AI market evolves towards the 95% use case of inferencing, preparing corporate unstructured data for AI data pipelines is becoming more crucial. Innovations across IT to address AI opportunities and threats, along with ever present cybersecurity needs, are coming fast and furious.
Here at Komprise, we are evolving to address these needs for customers, but our perspective is and has always been squarely on the unstructured data which is at the heart of so many challenges and opportunities today. In this post, we’ll do a quick review of some 2024 highlights and summarize how we are moving forward this year and beyond.
First though, a little context for those readers who don’t know us well. Most enterprise customers begin their journey with Komprise to optimize costs in their multi-petabyte data storage environment or to make the right decision for what data to migrate to what platform.
- Visibility Across Silos: We first help customers get immediate visibility into their unstructured data across storage silos so they can make the best decisions on how to right place it and how to reduce the annual storage bill. From there, there are opportunities to do much more. Learn more about Komprise Analysis.
- Global Search with Deep Analytics: Komprise is helping enterprise IT organizations answer ad hoc questions about their file and object data using our Deep Analytics search functionality. Are there legacy system application files that can be purged? Are noncompliant activities taking place – such as individuals storing large quantities of personal videos and photos? Which departments and individuals are consuming the most storage capacity? Can we consolidate all research files for a department by searching on file extensions and tags while also deleting duplicate data sets that were copied for projects and no longer needed? Learn more about Deep Analytics.
- Smart Data Workflows: The ability to efficiently find, tag, and move data—even to an external application for analysis—and back again is a game changer today when unstructured data is so large, unwieldy and diverse. Use cases include search and confine for deletion, AI data workflows, keyword and regex search, and sensitive data detection/mitigation. Every time we discuss Smart Data Workflows with customers we identify new potential use cases. This is an exciting area of innovation and opportunity to unlock greater value from unstructured data in the enterprise.
- AI Data Governance: Ensure that sensitive data doesn’t leak to GenAI tools. Our cofounder and COO Krishna Subramanian discussed this topic on a recent AWS podcast: AI Data Pipelines with Komprise and in a Blocks & Files interview.
- Automated, Transparent Tiering: Create policies to tier cold data to lower-cost storage without making users search for it nor break applications that depend upon it and give people and applications native access to data at the target. Read about Transparent Move Technology.
- Rapid Data Migration: Komprise migrates large volumes of unstructured data 25X faster than common tools—NFS , SMB or S3/object —and with a proven program called Assess Customer Environment (ACE) to avoid surprises that delay or break migrations. Read about Elastic Data Migration.
- Ransomware Defense: Shrink the ransomware attack surface by 80% when tiering cold data to immutable object storage. This is a growing use case as security and storage teams look to de-risk what is often the most vulnerable data in the enterprise and reduce overall ransomware data protection costs. Read the solution brief.
2024 Highlights
It was great to see growing recognition that data management is not data storage. Data management is an independent layer you need above your storage, but not in front of it.
Late in the year Gartner published two reports that highlight the benefits of storage-agnostic unstructured data management:
- Use Data Storage Management Services to Address Exponential Growth of Unstructured Data
- Modernize File Storage Data Services With Hybrid Cloud (Gartner subscription required.)
In 2024, Komprise was included in three Gartner Hype Cycles and a Market Guide:
- Market Guide for Hybrid Cloud Storage
- Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2024
- Hype Cycle for Backup and Data Protection Technologies, 2024
- Hype Cycle for Digital Sovereignty, 2024
We also received several industry honors during the year, including:
- Top Unstructured Data Management Supplier (Coldago Research)
- Inc. 5000 (third consecutive year)
- A Gold Stevie award for Data Tools & Platforms
- CRN Cloud 100
- Data Management Platform of the Year (Data Breakthrough Awards)
- Cloud Computing Product of the Year Award (Cloud Computing Magazine)
See our Awards & Recognition page for details.
Additionally, we released the 4th annual Komprise State of Unstructured Data Management report, highlighting IT priorities and plans for data storage, data management, hiring and AI.
The Power of the Platform and Partnerships
In the last year, Komprise made further investments in Smart Data Workflows, with the release of Smart Data Workflow Manager, a simplified UI to configure and monitor workflows for search and tagging, data movement, data governance and AI data pipelines. Most recently, Komprise announced new PII, regex and keyword detection capabilities for Sensitive Data Management.
Komprise is focused on growing our relationships with technology and channel partners to expand the value we provide to customers. Building on the success of the Azure File Data Migration Program and through the exclusive Komprise Intelligent Tiering for Azure offering, Komprise and Azure have helped customers like Katten Law shrink their ransomware attack surface by 80% while cutting 70%+ costs.
Komprise Smart Data Workflows gives customers like Duquesne University the ability to automate the use of cloud AI services like Amazon Rekognition for search and tagging images across their entire campus, saving months of recurring manual effort.
We were a Diamond Sponsor at Pure Accelerate and a Gold Sponsor at NetApp Insight and during the year hundreds of customers and partners became Komprise Technology Professional (KTP) certified.
So what’s next for Komprise?
Late last year, Komprise CEO and cofounder Kumar Goswami addressed the agenda for 2025 in this blog post.
These three trends will dictate IT strategies for data management:
- The mass availability of AI. As AI expands in maturity and applications, many organizations are finding that they are unprepared to safely and ethically launch these tools to the workforce.
- Unstructured data growth, which is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that we have the volume and diversity of data to generate new intelligence like we’ve never seen before. The curse is that this data is stretching the limits of IT budgets to store, backup and corral for re-use and to protect from cyber-attacks.
- The rising importance of the right infrastructure at the right time. AI needs specialized GPU compute and storage which are scarce. Data centers are running out of power and infrastructure costs are rising, so cost optimization remains a top CIO priority. Climate disasters and cyberattacks are becoming more deadly – calling for more data protection. Analyzing and right-placing data across silos of infrastructure will be a proactive strategy for the foreseeable future.
We’re lining up trade shows for the year, including Bio-IT World in April. We’re also planning a series of Komprise Days events with a focus on AI and unstructured data management in many cities this year.
Thanks to all our customers, partners and employees for a fantastic 2024. I couldn’t be more excited about what’s next for Komprise and storage-agnostic unstructured data management.
