Securing Unstructured Data is Key to Enabling GenAI: New Gartner® Report

Unstructured data is data that doesn’t have a pre-determined structure or format. It can be things like text, images audio files, video files and more. A large majority of organizations’ unstructured data lives in the cloud or in cloud apps. By some estimates, up to 80% of new data is unstructured data—that’s why it’s important to secure it.

New research from Gartner® addresses unstructured data and what it will take to achieve world-class security of it. The report looks at how data security will evolve over the next 3 – 5 years.

According to Gartner:

Over the past 15 years, Data security as a discipline has undergone huge paradigm shifts. Until around 2016, data security was solely threat-driven. It focused on finding potential attackers and mitigating their threats. It applied very restrictive controls, possibly hurting organizations, which needed to leverage their data as much as the envisaged attackers. 

Comparing the Current State of Data Security to the Future State

This Gartner report compares the current state of data security to the future state. In the current state, Gartner acknowledges many of the challenges that organizations face, including things like technical limitations of traditional products, cost optimization challenges, year-over-year prioritization of structured data at the expense of unstructured data and more. In the current state, organizations maintain unstructured data both on premises and in the cloud, resulting in uneven security controls between those two silos. Another core challenge: the adoption of controls for unstructured data is uneven across departments. For these reasons and more, the current state makes applying unform access and data protection policies to unstructured data a huge task. 

The future state, by contrast, happens when organizations establish a strong connection between data security controls and business strategy. Unified data discovery and cataloging paves the way for enhanced data security and governance. Future state organizations use precise entitlements as part of a broader Data Access Governance process to fine-tune access privileges. Tools like Enterprise Digital Rights Management (EDRM) and Content Services Platforms (CSPs) help organizations take a data-centric approach. Once there, organizations can focus on implementing next-generation DLP and Data Detection and Response (DDR) solutions as vendors build out robust capabilities over the next few years. 

A Migration Path to Get There

The migration plan is where the roadmap comes in. Gartner breaks things down in terms of higher priority items that should be addressed for quick wins, like leveraging siloed unstructured data for GenAI as a quick win, followed by medium priority items like adopting a DSPM product for discovery, mapping and cataloging. And lastly, the lower priority items like evaluating Data Detection and Response (DDR) options—these represent items that belong on the furthest part of the timeline since vendors are still building out those features. Other lower priority items are ones that are dependent on some of the earlier priorities. 

If your organization is working through processes to secure unstructured data, check out the Strategic Roadmap for World-Class Security of Unstructured Data report.