Storage-agnostic unstructured data management has been a key enabler to save $550,000, accelerate data movement and protect sensitive data at global financial services leader.
As this global financial services leader further modernizes its environment to the cloud and through building AI into its product portfolio, storage-agnostic unstructured data management has been a key enabler to save $550,000, accelerate data movement and protect sensitive data.
A London-based global company providing insurance brokerage and risk management services on every continent has been on a multi-year journey to move its vast IT infrastructure to the cloud. The IT team needed to efficiently migrate data off legacy storage solutions and into Microsoft Azure with low risk. They then wanted to tier cold data from the remaining on-premises file data store on NetApp to Azure, for additional cost savings and cloud acceleration.
Read this case study to learn about the IT organization’s implementation of Komprise Elastic Data Migration to launch its legacy storage migration project for Azure and later expansion to Intelligent Data Management for cold data tiering and ongoing data lifecycle management.
Learn more about Komprise for Financial Services.
More Komprise customer success stories.
Financial Services Industry FAQs
Why is unstructured data management such a persistent challenge for global financial services organizations?
Financial services firms operate in one of the most data-intensive and heavily regulated environments of any industry. Trading records, compliance documentation, client files, contracts, audit trails, and communications accumulate continuously across distributed environments spanning on-premises NAS, legacy storage systems, and multiple cloud platforms. The vast majority of this data is unstructured, which means it has no consistent schema, no automatic classification, and no built-in governance.
The pressure compounds on two fronts. Storage costs grow as data volumes multiply, but reducing spend is not simply a matter of deleting files. Regulatory retention requirements, legal hold obligations, and internal audit needs mean firms must keep enormous volumes of data accessible, governed, and searchable, even when it has not been touched in years. At the same time, cloud migration initiatives demand clean, risk-assessed data movement, and sensitive data scattered across legacy systems creates significant exposure if not identified and controlled before a migration begins.
According to the Komprise 2024 State of Unstructured Data Management Report, more than 55% of organizations spend more than 30% of their IT budget on data storage and management. For global financial services firms managing petabytes across multiple continents and regulatory jurisdictions, that figure can climb significantly higher.
What are the most important unstructured data use cases in financial services?
Several use cases surface consistently across global financial services IT organizations:
- Cloud migration with risk control: Large financial services firms typically manage data across legacy NAS environments that were never designed for cloud. Migrating that data cleanly, with full visibility into what is being moved, what is sensitive, and what can be decommissioned, is a foundational step in any cloud acceleration program.
- Cold data tiering for cost reduction: The majority of data on expensive primary storage in financial services environments has not been accessed in years. Identifying and tiering cold, stale, or duplicate files to lower-cost cloud object storage, without disrupting the applications and workflows that depend on them, directly reduces storage and backup costs.
- Sensitive data detection and compliance: Financial services firms handle client PII, trade data, and proprietary business information subject to GDPR, SEC, FCA, and a growing list of regional regulations. Automated sensitive data detection gives compliance and IT teams the ability to find, classify, and govern regulated data across petabytes before it becomes a breach or audit liability.
- Data lifecycle management: Storage environments that grow without governance become increasingly difficult and expensive to manage. Policy-based lifecycle management automates what happens to data as it ages, from primary storage to cloud to archive to deletion, reducing manual effort and keeping storage aligned with business and compliance requirements.
- AI data preparation: As financial services firms build AI into their product and operations portfolios, governed, curated unstructured data becomes a competitive asset. Komprise Deep Analytics and Smart Data Workflows can classify and route internal data to AI pipelines automatically, with full audit trails and access controls.
How did this global financial services leader save $550,000 and accelerate its cloud journey with Komprise?
The organization, a London-based insurance brokerage and risk management firm operating on every continent, faced a challenge common to large global enterprises: petabytes of data spread across aging legacy NAS environments, with no clear picture of what existed, what was sensitive, and what could safely be moved or tiered.
The IT team began with Komprise Elastic Data Migration to move data off legacy storage and into Microsoft Azure. Full visibility into the environment before migration meant the team could assess risk, identify sensitive data, and prioritize what to move, without the guesswork that typically leads to costly migration errors or compliance exposure.
Once the migration foundation was in place, the team expanded to Komprise Intelligent Data Management for ongoing cold data tiering from on-premises NetApp to Azure, and for data lifecycle management. The result was $550,000 in storage and operational cost savings, faster cloud adoption across the organization, and a governed, right-placed data estate that continues to scale without proportional cost increases.
Read: Financial Services Leader Speeds Cloud Journey with Komprise
How does Komprise protect sensitive data in financial services environments?
Financial services firms carry some of the highest data breach costs of any sector. According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach for a financial services organization reached $6.08 million in 2024, more than 22% above the global average across all industries. That exposure is amplified when sensitive data is scattered across legacy NAS, unclassified, and invisible to the security and compliance teams responsible for governing it.
Komprise addresses this directly. Once the sensitive data management Smart Data Workflow has been created to identify files containing PII, regulated financial data, and other sensitive content, Deep Analytics can be used to file content, headers, and metadata across unstructured data storage environments. Once identified, sensitive files can be tagged, quarantined, tiered to governed storage, or acted on through automated data management policies, all with full audit trails.
Transparent Move Technology ensures that any data movement, whether for tiering or archiving, preserves file access paths and governance policies throughout. Financial services IT and compliance teams get the visibility and control they need across petabytes of data, across every storage silo, without disrupting the trading systems, client applications, and workflows that depend on that data.
What makes Komprise the right choice for financial services unstructured data management?
Financial services firms need a data management platform that can handle the scale and complexity of a global enterprise, the sensitivity of regulated financial data, and the pace of a multi-year cloud transformation, without requiring rip-and-replace infrastructure changes or disrupting the production systems that keep the business running.
Komprise is purpose-built for this environment:
- Non-disruptive by design: Transparent Move Technology migrates and tiers data without breaking application access paths or changing how trading systems, client portals, or compliance tools reach their data. There is no downtime, no retraining, and no change management burden on the business.
- Storage and cloud agnostic: Komprise works across on-premises NAS from NetApp, HPE, and others, and tiers or migrates to Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, so firms are never locked into a single vendor or cloud provider as their infrastructure evolves.
- Compliance built in: Automated sensitive data detection, policy-based lifecycle management, and full audit trails give compliance and legal teams the governance controls they need across every storage environment, supporting GDPR, SEC, FCA, and broader regulatory requirements.
- AI ready: As financial services firms build AI into their product portfolios, Smart Data Workflows and KAPPA data services classify, enrich, and route internal data to AI pipelines automatically, with the governance and access controls that regulated industries require.