Report: 80% of the global datasphere will be unstructured by 2025

According to a new report from nRoad, analysts predict the global datasphere will grow to 163 zettabytes by 2025, and about 80% of that will be unstructured. In regulated industries like financial services, the challenges posed by unstructured data are exponentially greater. It is estimated that two-thirds of financial data is hidden in content sources that are not readily transparent. As unstructured data grows at an unprecedented rate, financial services organizations struggle to leverage data and derive actionable insights.

Through extensive research, nRoad discovered that volume, speed, variability and diversity compounded the challenge. Unstructured data without metadata, such as B. field names, multiply every year at an increasing rate. However, most of a company’s unstructured data is in the form of documents containing customer communications. And the content of documents differs so significantly – not only from domain to domain, but also between specific use cases within domains.

Current approaches, from robotic process automation (RPA) to natural language processing (NLP) models that use deep learning to produce human-like text, remain impractically resource-intensive and too general to capture all of the niche problems in to tackle companies. These generic one-size-fits-all solutions lack domain knowledge and industry-specific terminology, which reduces their value. Even if they can successfully process 90% of a document in many real world scenarios, the critical 10% will not be correctly extracted.

The landscape that is emerging to deal with unstructured data will not consist of a single winner-take-all platform. Instead, the ecosystem will be far more fragmented and specialized, with solution providers responding to specific business needs and driving business outcomes based on their proven ability to solve a handful of unstructured data challenges, rather than solving them all.

First and foremost, reliable enterprise unstructured data processing requires the incorporation of domain knowledge as more than just an adjunct to a larger platform. Instead, it is an inseparable part of any basis for extracting and summarizing documents. Financial service providers cannot leave 85% of their data behind. With the approach outlined here, you have the opportunity to integrate valuable information and insights from unstructured sources into mission-critical business processes.

Read nRoad’s full report.