Driving innovation in the public sector by ‘uncomplicating’ unstructured data management

Last year, the government launched Transforming for a Digital Future, a 2025 roadmap for the UK, with an ambition to transform public services through world-class technology. However, delivering on this roadmap relies on having fast and efficient digital systems, and high quality data.

Public sector organisations looking to align with this roadmap and deliver better experiences and outcomes for their citizens need to understand the sheer magnitude of their unstructured data in order to harness it through AI and analytics, streamline operations, and solve the many related data management challenges. Unstructured data has exploded—and it’s not slowing down. The total volume of data created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide by 2024 will cross 149 zettabytes every year, according to Statista. Much of it will be unstructured, which we know has massive value, but also challenges and complexities.

Leveraging unstructured data has enormous implications for the public sector, including – but not limited to – healthcare, the emergency services, and education. Effectively analysing unstructured data can empower decision making for civil servants by providing better and faster insights and automating repetitive tasks. 

However, it can be a complicated journey to get to these kinds of benefits. Unstructured data comes in a wide range of formats, sizes, and can be stored as files or objects. Unlike structured data, unstructured data is hard to organise, categorise, and search, due to the variety of forms it can take. It can consist of anything from image and sound files to website copy and information from wearable devices. With the volume of data increasing at an unparalleled rate, the challenges have only worsened. Public sector organisations must deploy scalable technology to turn this data to their advantage. With increasingly demanding storage performance needs and AI use cases, the rise of unstructured data has resulted in the popularity of unified fast file and object storage.

The growing importance of unified fast file and object storage: platform reusability

A key requirement of the Digital Future roadmap is the “buy once, use many times” and promote multi-use technology. For decades, file storage has been a mainstream option, and historically, object has been the least-performant storage type and has formed a separate product category. However, as organisations increasingly need to analyse large amounts of unstructured data that can be in object format as well as file, this view of object storage has changed. Today’s applications may be written to support network file system (NFS) and server message block (SMB) file protocols, but more and more applications and use cases require object storage support, such as Amazon S3. A platform that can support both access methods with high performance and scale ensures investment protection during and after this transition. All these factors have led to the emergence of high performance storage solutions that combine access to file and object. Object storage support also makes it ideal for hybrid applications, facilitating transition of unstructured data between on-site and cloud locations.

Modern data and AI use cases

High performance, scale and flexibility are required to unlock the potential of AI/ML as well as many modern analytics frameworks. Public sector organisations are often tasked with doing more with less, automation and tools such as Generative AI have huge potential for increasing efficiency without increasing costs. As part of the UK’s roadmap, between now and 2025 there will be a special focus on enabling departments to make confident and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence to improve efficiency and services. All-flash unified file and object storage offers the performance and flexibility needed for AI projects.

Ensuring your data mission is possible

As part of the UK digital roadmap, there is a big emphasis on improving data quality, and to make all ‘essential shared’ data assets available and in use across government through trusted APIs and platforms where necessary. However, many organisations don’t know how to categorise their crucial and non-crucial data, meaning more storage space is consumed unnecessarily. After all, if you don’t know what data to keep and what to lose, holding onto all of it is a valuable waste of resources. While unstructured data is more complicated to store, manage, analyse, and process than structured data, many tools and applications exist today (including a growing number of AI tools) to help organisations understand and manage their unstructured data as well as extract the hidden value within it, however these tools are only effective when data access is not limited by the underlying platforms.

Sustainability

Sustainability is, rightly so, a key part of the Digital Future strategy. With data volume growth projected to hit 10x by 2030, the power efficiency and sustainable lifecycle of data storage platforms are now a focus for public sector organisations. An effective way to improve the sustainability of digital public services organisations is to use ultra-dense, all-Flash unstructured data storage solutions that not only reduce power consumption and carbon footprint but also e-waste by stretching their lifecycle and reducing the amount of components being replaced over time.

The sky’s the ‘data’ limit

Whether it’s humans or machines doing the searching, unstructured data is rich with hidden patterns and insights that can give public sector organisations new and innovative ways to succeed. Data analysis applications can look at multiple streams of unconnected data (such weather data, social media, survey results etc.) to find new patterns and correlations. By leveraging the right modern infrastructure solutions to get insight into these patterns, and uncomplicating data storage and management, the public sector can meet the UK’s 2025 digital roadmap and drive efficiency, simplicity, and performance, delivering better services and outcomes for citizens.