It's been over a year since most U.S. knowledge workers shifted to working remotely. As we start to see a return to normalcy, the workplace that we'll return to won't be the same as the one we left. One trend is here to stay: the growing reliance on cloud-based collaboration applications. Hundreds of millions of people use Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Slack to share information and stay connected.

But as the use of collaboration tools grows, so does complexity of finding information across these disparate platforms. For those responsible for the daunting task of accessing and protecting this information, the proliferation of fragmented data and maturing privacy regulations is a perfect storm of risk.

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The Unique Challenges of Unstructured Data

An unintended consequence of this explosion of cloud-based tools is the exponential increase in unstructured data, which is inherently difficult to navigate and manage. Structured data is defined as highly-organized and formatted in a way so it's easily searchable whereas unstructured data has no pre-defined format or organization, making it much more difficult to collect, process, and analyze. Analyzing massive amounts of traditional, structured data is difficult enough. Doing so with unstructured data is like navigating a vast ocean without a map. And the challenge is getting bigger. According to market intelligence company, IDC, the worldwide volume of data is set to grow from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 zettabytes (or 175 billion terabytes) by 2025 and, by then, 80% of it will be unstructured (which includes things like audio, .txt files, images, chat messages and emojis).