Your organization is drowning in data. Maybe it’s time you put it to work

Data silos are where teams go to play hide and seek.

Picture this: Marketing is collecting social metrics, Sales is tracking online and in-store purchases, and Product is conducting usability testing. Sound familiar?

If they all shared their data, they would probably discover a thing or two about their customers. Unfortunately, each team is hiding in a data silo. They use their own software, spreadsheets, and repositories. No one sees what the other is doing. 

Now, let’s say an enterprising Product lead wants to learn about customer buying trends. To do this, they need Sales and Marketing data. So now they have to painstakingly track it down. They send emails and chats to other team members within the company. They might even have to open a ticket. 

A Forrester study concluded employees spend 12 hours a week chasing data. That’s a fourth of their total productive output — wasted simply looking for what they need to get to work. 

Things haven’t improved since then. According to IBM, 82% of enterprises say data silos are disrupting their workflows. And it’s only going to get worse from here. 

More data than we know what to do with

If data silos are such an issue in 2025, it’s because, well, there’s more data than ever before. And it’s piling up. 

Exactly how much data is out there? 

Estimates suggest we’ll have generated around 181 zettabytes by the end of the year. That’s a tough number to wrap your head around. But think about this: back in 2010, we were creating, capturing, copying, and consuming a measly 2 zettabytes. 

So, what accounts for this massive data explosion? 

Take your pick: mobile devices, the Internet of Things, social media. Wherever you look, there’s a constant stream of videos, text messages, audios, customer transactions, and sensor information. And much of this is falling through the cracks of fragmented organizational structures. 

Of course, data silos have always been problematic. Yet with so much data at stake, they can now be absolutely destructive for your business, stifling innovation and dragging you behind the competition. It’s time to take action. 

Escaping the data silos

Simply put, modern organizations need modern data intelligence and management. They need visibility across their entire supply chain. They need to centralize all that data that used to be sequestered within specific areas and domains. 

In short, they need to connect their data, make sure it’s easy to find and easier to cross-reference. 

Part of this change is cultural. Your teams need to understand that their data belongs to the entire organization. They need to work together, instead of hoarding data in the hopes of gaining an advantage for their upcoming quarterly review. 

But another part is strategic. It’s investing in the technology and the tools that allow you to capture, store, integrate, process, analyze, and secure your data — and doing away with outdated legacy systems and manual processes. 

Swimming in data lakes

An increasingly popular solution? Data lakes. 

These are central repositories that can store many kinds of data, whether structured, semistructured, or unstructured. 

So, not just data you’ve already organized and categorized into columns and rows. But also wild and untamed video, audio, text, social chatter, information from IoT devices, website analytics, meetings that could have been emails, emails that should have been meetings, and much more.

All this unstructured data accounts for most of what your organization is generating. In fact, probably around 90% of it. 

In this context, it’s easy to see why data lakes are booming. Recent estimates point to data lakes becoming a $90 billion market by 2032. That’s over three times the size of the market right now. 

But data lakes are not just about storage. They can future-proof your business, allowing you to leverage all the data you’re already producing ​​in the age of AI. 

Giving your data context changes everything

When you integrate your data into a single repository, you’re making it more accessible — and also richer. Because you’re connecting results, feedback, performance indicators, and more from a variety of sources, often in real-time. 

And by implementing AI and machine learning tools, you can make sense of it all, process it, organize it, and even plot it on a dashboard, at speeds that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. 

So when you sit down to make a business decision, you’re not relying on a single point-of-view. You’re finding the best course of action based on all the data collected across your supply chain. You’re getting truly interdisciplinary insights. 

For example, let’s say you want to review how a product is performing. Now you can potentially analyze sales, customer service requests, social media reactions, online reviews, manufacturing processes, materials sourcing and logistics — all together. 

You can ask questions that stretch from how efficiently the product is being produced to where and when it’s being purchased. 

This leads, eventually, to better products and services. In fact, in a recent Amazon-commissioned survey by 451 Research, this was identified as the main benefit of data lakes, closely followed by improved business agility. 

But there are additional benefits, too. Data lakes can help with regulatory compliance. By placing all your data under the same cloud-based roof, it’s easier to keep an eye on it. There’s more visibility and transparency throughout your organization. 

However, there’s a secret benefit to data lakes: they help communicate the fact that everyone at your organization is working towards a shared goal. 

Connecting your data also means helping teams help each other. Now everyone can appreciate the usefulness of what everyone else is working on. Every team is using, applying, and making decisions based on data captured by other teams. 

In short, data lakes allow us to discover the value all of us bring to each other. 

Data is not some dry, technical topic. It’s deeply human: a representation of what we’re all doing, seeing, and experiencing out in the world.