Unstructured data has proliferated across the average organisation with little thought given to how this content should be stored, protected, managed and shared. Yet there’s a growing recognition that information that lives outside relational databases is every bit as important as the structured data that most companies manage with such rigorous discipline.

According to a frequently cited stat from Gartner, around 80 percent of the content in most enterprises is unstructured data like e-mail, paper documents, scanned documents and images, PDF files, sound and video files, text files, and presentations. The content is scattered across the organisation, often housed on end-user hard drives or in user-defined directories with few rules about where this content is stored and how it’s managed.