Heading into 2026 got me thinking about this journey into unstructured data management that my cofounders and I started back in 2014. Launching a startup in a new, unproven category comes with plenty of struggles, yet we knew that enterprises were experiencing a problem with unstructured data growth, cost and risk that was only going to compound in time.
Today, industry analysts are starting to cover unstructured data management and data services as its own category and realizing that for over 30 years, innovation has primarily focused on structured data and not this segment.
Komprise is now managing well over an exabyte of data across our enterprise customers. We also continue to post record growth despite the uncertain macroeconomic climate. This year, for the fourth year in a row, we again achieved placements on the Deloitte Fast 500 and Inc. 5000 lists of fastest-growing private companies.
But what’s most gratifying to me and my cofounders is that our customers across industries see measurable value in our solution and they continue to expand their use cases with our software as a service (SaaS) platform. We know that unstructured data growth today is a massive pressure for IT teams in terms of cost, security, and AI preparation; unstructured data is already 90% of all enterprise data.
In just one year, there has been a 57% increase in the amount of unstructured data stored by organizations, according to findings from our latest survey.
Enterprise IT teams need a host of new technologies for competitive gain and risk management beyond just an efficient, high-performance storage and networking infrastructure. They need tools to monitor usage and governance and then act on that insight to reduce costs and security risks and make better use of their storage and network infrastructure.
They need to tag and catalog unstructured data and then curate and feed just the right data to AI to ensure their AI projects are cost and time efficient and provide accurate results. In each case, an independent data management platform is required.
Below are three customer stories that caught my attention in the past year, demonstrating how Komprise fits into these modern requirements.
Reducing Storage Costs with Tagging and Showback Reporting
Helping enterprises reduce unnecessary storage costs is for many the initial use case for Komprise. We knew that keeping all unstructured data on primary, high-performance NAS was an expensive yet avoidable problem. Therefore, we developed Komprise to deliver analytics on file and object data across hybrid storage to find cold data and transparently tier it to much less expensive storage. The outcome: cut storage costs by an average 70%.
What’s unique is that we do this with zero impact to users and without disrupting ongoing projects and without lock-in. You can move from one storage vendor to another without facing any rehydration costs, giving you tremendous negotiation power. What’s more, IT administrators can engage departmental users in data tiering, driving further cost savings.
One of our top customers, a large academic medical center, has saved more than $4 million with Komprise intelligent data tiering. Here’s what they did:
- Not knowing anything about the data, the IT staff initially set up Komprise to tier data that had not been accessed in over one year. To improve on this, they gave more than 100 users access to Komprise Deep Analytics, where they can see how much data they have, how fast it’s growing, what they are accessing and what they are not.
- Armed with this insight, they could select files, such as from research projects that had completed, and tag them as “ready to tier.” This simple approach of using departmental collaboration led to 3x larger data volumes tiered.
- As an incentive to participate in the tagging program, IT used the Komprise Showback report to create a chargeback program that billed only for data stored on-premises. Tiered data is stored at no cost to a department.
Achieving Affordable Ransomware Protection for All Unstructured Data
Like many other large law firms, Katten Law has been seeing an average 20% annual growth in storage for file related data, resulting in the need to add on-premises storage capacity every 12-18 months. They adopted Komprise to control the chaos with flexible, automated cloud data tiering. The firm has already avoided at least $400K in storage expansion and expects another $500K–$700K in savings as it re-platforms to an efficient cloud-ready storage system.
At the same time, the IT leader said that Komprise is helping them address a mission-critical threat: ransomware. His peers at other firms have experienced attacks and he didn’t want to be next.
Katten is using Komprise to shrink the attack surface and move 60–70% of its cold data into immutable cloud object storage. That data becomes read-only and far harder for attackers to touch, yet attorneys still access everything exactly the same way thanks to Komprise TMT. That’s imperative for when old case files need to be easily and quickly restored.
“Komprise has not only allowed the firm to reduce on-premise storage requirements but has become a catalyst for our cloud strategy while at the same time providing us with a tool that enhances both our compliance and security posture, reducing our attack surface on an ongoing basis.” — Katten Law’s IT infrastructure director.
Intelligent, Cost-Effective AI Data Workflows
The IT organization at a major East Coast hospital needed to support its clinical team that was experimenting with AI image analysis of pathology slides. The clinical team scans tissue slides around the clock, generating massive image files (often 50GB each) and more than 2PB of new data every year that is stored on expensive on-prem flash arrays.
Every 10 minutes, Komprise finds and sends copies of the latest slides to the cloud for AI processing. Clinicians get fast, accurate results: no more counting mitosis by hand.
IT avoids ballooning cloud storage costs with a Komprise automated workflow that curates a small subset of files and then deletes cloud copies after 30 days. This is resulting in a 96% reduction in cloud costs, according to the senior technical architect in charge of the AI data management program.
- Meanwhile, the original data stays safely on-prem for long-term retention and compliance.
- Researchers can find historical slide data using Komprise queries without re-running AI jobs.
- The team is planning to enrich metadata for self-service search, integrate with Snowflake, and expand the workflow to radiology.
This is an exciting, progressive workflow leveraging smarter data management. It makes AI cheaper, faster, and easier to operationalize across clinical care.
Any enterprise prioritizing cost optimization, cyber-resilience or AI can benefit from unstructured data management just the same way as the organizations highlighted here. The AI opportunities with unstructured data are just beginning to take shape. We thank our customers, partners and employees for all their contributions in 2025. I wish you all happy holidays and we are excited to drive this transformation with more innovation in 2026!
