As global data creation accelerates toward an estimated 181 zettabytes by 2025, organisations face mounting pressure to manage information in a safe and effective manner. Businesses are challenged not just by volume, but by disorder, and the ability to govern data with clarity has become a competitive differentiator.
According to Simon Godfrey, Head of ECM Business Solutions at Kyocera Document Solutions UK, unstructured data from emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, scanned documents and many other sources, is rife in businesses making them vulnerable to a cyber attack.
“It’s often scattered across departments and systems, disconnected from workflows. This fragmentation slows decision-making, inflates costs, and exposes organisations to unnecessary regulatory andreputational risks
Recent research has highlighted the scale of the challenge, with some studies showing that as much as 90% of corporate information, including emails, PDFs, slide decks and legacy files, is unstructured, making it difficult for organisations to extract insights or maintain compliance.
Healthcare faces the same challenge, with recent studies showing patient records and clinical documents siloed across faxes, scanned notes, and legacy systems, causing major operational and interoperability problems.
For highly regulated sectors such as financial services, healthcare and legal, this lack of structure can have serious consequences. Incomplete audit trails, version confusion, or inconsistent retention policies can all lead to compliance breaches and loss of trust.
“Structured data management is no longer a technical luxury, it’s a compliance necessity,” Godfrey continued. “When content is tagged, indexed, and enriched with metadata, organisations can automate document retention, control access, and respond to subject access requests with confidence. It’s about turning governance into a proactive capability, rather than a reactive burden.”
Artificial intelligence amplifies the benefits of structured data, but only when the underlying information is properly organised. Modern platforms can automatically classify, tag, and route documents, enforcing retention rules and access controls consistently across an organisaton.
“AI is a tremendous enabler, but its potential is often blocked by unstructured data. Without structure, even the most advanced AI systems produce unreliable insights,” said Godfrey.
Despite these tools, many organisations still operate across multiple data silos. HR systems, finance platforms, shared drives, and legacy archives often contain overlapping or outdated records, reducing visibility and increasing operational risk.
“Unstructured data is vulnerable. Let’s take an email or a media file, they are difficult to classify and therefore secure with appropriate access level controls. These file types often contain Personal Identification Data (PID) making them more desirable to share across networks, personal devices and third-party cloud applications, especially in the form of shadow IT where employees are use unauthorised applications. The result is a data sprawl that puts organisations at increased risk of a data breach or critical information being exposed through generative AI output that is not ringfenced within the organisational network.”
Godfrey concluded that by unifying data silos through structured content management, organisations can create a single source of truth.
“That clarity enables faster, more accurate decisions, and eliminates duplication that wastes both time and storage resources. We’re living in an age of data accountability. Structure isn’t just about organisation, it’s about empowerment. When data is structured, governed, and accessible, businesses can protect themselves while unlocking new potential for innovation and growth.”
