Data may be driving today’s enterprise, but the engine is only using a fraction of its horsepower.

A recent information technology study by Cohesity Inc. found that a significant majority — approximately 80 percent — of an organization’s data is not mission critical. It’s languishing in backups, object stores and archives scattered across public and private clouds. The result is data fragmentation, a growing issue within the IT community that involves the spread of information into infrastructure silos, preventing a business from realizing the true value of the data it owns.

“We’ve always had data fragmentation, but it’s becoming worse,” said Zeus Kerravala (pictured, left), founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting Inc. “It’s hampering a company’s ability to make critical decisions to be able to move fast and keep up with a lot of cloud-native counterparts. If they don’t get a handle on this, they’re going to fall further and further behind.”

Kerravala spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts. He was joined by Peter Smails (pictured, right), chief marketing officer and vice president of business development and alliances at Imanis Data Inc., and they discussed software-driven solutions focused on key database technologies and collaboration with Cohesity to provide a simpler, insightful approach. (* Disclosure below.)

Machine learning insight

To tackle this problem, Imanis Data has developed a data-aware software solution that is powered by machine learning and focused on backup, recovery and archiving. It is architected for petabyte scale and designed to enable insight for all enterprise data.

As enterprises have become more reliant on Hadoop and NoSQL databases for hosting applications, Imanis Data has focused its solution on addressing fragmentation issues with those technologies as well.

“Hadoop and NoSQL are contributors to mass data fragmentation, but if they’re part of the problem then they need to be part of the solution,” Smails said. “We are drowning and need tools and help to solve this problem.”

To provide the much-needed tools, Imanis Data has partnered with Cohesity to offer enterprise data management software with a hyperconverged secondary storage platform. The goal is simplification, achieving a unified view that is data-aware across the organization.

“The combination of Cohesity’s solution and Imanis Data’s solution ultimately will provide that single pane of glass,” Smails said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Imanis Data Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Imanis Data nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE