Data Management Glossary
Unstructured Data Preparation
Unstructured data preparation is the process of identifying, organizing, enriching, and curating unstructured data, such as files, images, videos, documents, and logs, so it can be effectively used for AI, analytics, or automation.
Unstructured data preparation may includes
- Discovery: Finding the right data across data silos
- Classification: Tagging by type, owner, sensitivity, usage (see data classification)
- Filtering & Curation: Selecting only relevant or usable data (see data curation)
- Formatting/Conversion: Making data readable for downstream tools
- Metadata Enrichment: Adding context for AI/ML models
Why Is Unstructured Data Preparation Critical for Enterprise AI?
Unstructured data accounts for over 80% of enterprise data, yet it’s often:
- Siloed across on-prem and cloud systems
- Poorly tagged or understood
- Costly to store and move in bulk
- Risky due to embedded sensitive or irrelevant content
Enterprise AI projects, including GenAI, need clean, labeled, and relevant data to succeed. Without data preparation:
- Models get trained on noisy, redundant, or biased data
- Costs balloon due to unnecessary data movement
- Governance, compliance, and ethical AI become difficult
Preparing unstructured data is not just a technical task – it’s a business-critical step for trusted, efficient AI outcomes.
Connecting Data Preparation for AI to Your Unstructured Data Management Strategy
Unstructured data prep isn’t a standalone activity, it must be part of a broader data management framework that includes:
- Visibility: Know what data you have, where, and how it’s used
- Classification & Tagging: Group by content, sensitivity, owners, and usage
- Lifecycle Management: Archive or delete redundant/unneeded data (see cold data and ROT data)
- Access & Movement: Ensure secure, cost-effective delivery to AI platforms
- Policy Automation: Apply governance rules across systems (see data governance)
Without an unstructured data management foundation, data preparation becomes manual, risky, and unsustainable at scale.
How Komprise Enables Unstructured Data Preparation for AI
Komprise helps enterprises prepare AI-ready data at petabyte scale by applying intelligent data management across all file and object storage – on-prem and cloud. For organizations with petabytes of unorganized data, Komprise provides global metadata indexing & search. For organizations building AI data pipelines that quickly become bloated with messy and potentially harmful data, Komprise provides Smart Data Workflows & filtering. For organizations looking to address data privacy and compliance concerns, Komprise provides PII detection and tagging. And finally, for organizations who are experiencing high data movement costs, Komprise provides intelligent data tiering and high-performance data mobility solutions. Here is a summary of the Komprise Data Experience for unstructured data preparation use cases:
Global Data Visibility
- Komprise indexes file and object metadata across all storage silos—without moving data
- Komprise enables fast search/filtering across billions of files
Smart Data Workflows
- Komprise can automate data classification, tagging, and enrichment (e.g., by file type, PII presence, owner, project)
Policy-Based Data Curation
- Identifies and extracts only relevant, curated subsets of data for AI pipelines
- Filters by metadata (e.g., “Last accessed < 1 year”, “Owner = R&D”, “File type = .dcm”)
Sensitive Data Management
- Detects and flags PII or compliance risks before feeding data into AI models (read solution brief)
Optimized Data Movement
- Moves selected datasets to AI platforms without breaking file paths or access permissions
- Avoids “rehydration” costs from archive tiers
Example Komprise Unstructured Data Preparation Use Case
A healthcare organization wants to train an AI model on radiology images stored across multiple NAS systems.
With Komprise, they can:
- Identify all .dcm image files
- Filter for files accessed in the last 2 years from oncology teams
- Exclude files with flagged PII
- Move only the curated set to a cloud AI platform, saving cost and risk
Komprise gives AI teams only the data they need, with the context they require, without the overhead of managing and moving unstructured data manually.
