Imagine you had you a 1,000-square-foot home and in just a few years you added 800 times more belongings to your space? You would need to move into a house that is at least 8,000 square feet. Well, the lid is about to be blown off of storage. According to analysts, unstructured data - such as documents, emails and videos - is expected to grow more than 800 percent in the next five years.

What does this mean for an organization? Two of the biggest concerns are compliance and data governance. Are the people accessing your data the appropriate personnel? Even if they are the right people, the company needs to ensure that correct security policies are in place to avoid the penalties associated with non-compliance should an audit be required.

According to an industry survey by Aberdeen Group, nearly 40 percent of sensitive data is in unstructured formats such as PDF and Microsoft Office files like Word and Excel. The challenge is how to give access to those who need it, and shut out those who do not. As our ever-pervasive world of data explodes, the business need to access data from anywhere on any device - mobile devices, remote desktops and laptops - grows exponentially. This need is pushing the commoditization of data storage in the main data centers.

The current trend is oversubscription on storage allocation via thin provisioning. Technologies such as FastVP on EMC arrays will "automagically" move lesser-used blocks to low-end SATA drives. Conversely there is demand for fast access at the edge networks using caching devices, WAN accelerators and other related technologies. The double-edged sword is 1) making sure that data security is compliant and 2) that security policies give access to only those who need it. In addition, infrastructure is needed to monitor activity and notify if abnormal behavior is detected.

For those executives on the move from one location to the next, demand for fast access to data will drive more fluid technology, as well as the infrastructure to deliver the same end-user experience at cheaper costs. No one has a crystal ball, but it seems that the infrastructure will need to be more like a content delivery mechanism with commoditized storage in the main datacenters and fast access at the edge networks that are closest to the users, mobile devices or servers.

With access to unstructured data from so many points, compliance and data governance will be exponentially important and difficult. Companies will need greater visibility into the cloud infrastructure for a clearer picture of their data and who is using it. Without that visibility, the risk of non-compliance is great. And as the cloud infrastructure grows and extends, it will be even harder to see who is accessing what from where.