According to research from IDC, by 2025 as much as 80% of the world’s data will be unstructured. And Cybersecurity Ventures found that global data storage will exceed 200 zettabytes in 2025—half of that data will be stored in the cloud. 

Unstructured data (which includes emails, social media posts, images, videos, customer reviews and more) is not organized in a pre-defined manner or lacks a specific data model, making it difficult to process and analyze using conventional tools and methods. But unstructured data is valuable; it contains vast amounts of information that can provide deep insights. If you know how to handle it properly.  

Unfortunately, unstructured data also poses a security risk, as it can contain sensitive business data or personally identifiable information. And since all unstructured data is shared with end-user applications using standard protocols over TCP/IP networks, it’s a prime target for threat actors.

Protecting unstructured data has always been a challenge in on-premises environments, where  exponential data growth can overwhelm traditional backup solutions and pressure IT teams to manage and protect it effectively. Similarly, in cloud environments, safeguarding unstructured data poses unique challenges due to the dynamic nature of cloud storage and the need to secure data across multiple cloud platforms and services. 

Given the dynamic and dispersed nature of unstructured data, it’s clear that businesses need robust cybersecurity measures and efficient data management to ensure the security and integrity of this ever-expanding universe of critical data assets. 

Top Three Unstructured Data Problems

Let’s look at 3 of the most common problems associated with unstructured data protection:

1. Scale

Due to its constantly changing nature and growing size, unstructured data needs backup and recovery methods that are optimized, fast and scalable for reliable protection. Traditional backup approaches face limitations in efficiently protecting the vast scale of unstructured data, leading to performance inefficiencies and increased vulnerability, especially when dealing with data at scale.

2. Security

Due to the growing threat of malware such as ransomware, backups need to be stored in secure immutable formats to protect them from being modified or deleted.  Traditional backup methods may lack immutability and encryption, leaving data vulnerable to cyber threats. Organizations need a solution that is cyber-resilient, can identify the attack blast radius, and has a heterogeneous recovery capability.

3. Sensitive Data Monitoring

Enterprises must safeguard sensitive information to comply with regulations like HIPAA and GDPR. Traditional backup solutions often lack the ability to discover and protect sensitive data, leaving organizations unaware of data exposure risks over time. Organizations need solutions that can offer data usage reporting, sensitive/PCI data analysis, and compliance assurance mechanisms.

How Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct Can Help

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is a SaaS-based offering designed to efficiently protect and manage petabyte-scale unstructured data. The solution supports a diverse range of on-premises and cloud-based data sources, including on-premises S3-compatible object stores, generic NAS storage, and API integration with storage providers such as Dell, Netapp, Pure Storage, Qumulo, Azure, Amazon, and more.

Unstructured data

Here’s how Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct addresses the three core challenges of scale, security, and compliance. 

1. Rapid Backup and Performance at Scale

NAS Cloud Direct ensures the protection of billions of files across several NAS technologies through highly efficient scanning, indexing, and data movement. It is powered by advanced engines that are designed to overcome the typical performance and scale limitations of traditional data-management tools. Designed for high-speed data transfers, it optimizes network bandwidth during backup, archive, and replication tasks without impacting production file services. It uses a simple policy-based model that is user-defined to decide backup frequency, data retention, and optional replication targets (local or cloud-based). 

The solution also enables rapid and efficient recovery and archival, offering the ability to quickly search through billions of files and recover to AWS, on-premises, or alternate targets. This allows businesses to maintain lower risk by adhering to Recovery Point Objectives (RPO),  reduce the cost of infrastructure and storage required for backups, and decrease the time and resources needed to manage and maintain backups.

2. Cyber Resilience and Recovery

Using zero-trust principles, Rubrik provides centralized data backup and security policies across enterprise, cloud, and SaaS applications, ensuring secure data protection, recovery, and access. It implements strong authentication through Single Sign-On (SSO), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and SSO with SAML for customers to use their enterprise identity providers for authentication. Rubrik’s immutable backup snapshots ensure that ransomware or unauthorized users cannot alter or delete backup data. 

Rubrik’s Anomaly Detection features proactively monitor data patterns to identify signs of ransomware and other threats. By detecting unusual activity early, Rubrik helps

organizations respond swiftly to potential attacks, enhancing overall data security. In the event of a ransomware attack, Rubrik helps identify blast radius of the attack, and enables rapid data recovery from snapshots that are free of anomalies. This helps businesses mitigate revenue loss risks due to downtime, enhance data security and reduce recovery-related risks.

3. Sensitive Data Monitoring and Compliance

NAS Cloud Direct offers actionable insights into backup data, enabling proactive risk mitigation and storage cost reduction. It provides advanced backup reporting and analysis capabilities, including scanning backups to detect and report on sensitive data. By classifying petabytes of data, NAS Cloud Direct helps identify and protect sensitive information to ensure regulatory compliance effectively. This helps to enhance visibility into sensitive data locations and compliance status, reduce storage infrastructure costs and minimize risks of sensitive data exposure and fines for non-compliance.

Rubrik NAS Cloud offers robust unstructured data protection and management across on-premises and cloud-native environments. By integrating advanced capabilities for rapid backup, anomaly detection for cyber recovery, and sensitive data monitoring, Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct helps organizations efficiently tackle the evolving challenges of data protection, cyber resilience, and sensitive data protection for their unstructured data. 

Learn more about Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct or experience first-hand with an interactive demo.