Unstructured data, information without a predefined format, such as emails, PDFs, images, audio recordings and social media posts, now accounts for about 80–90% of the data generated by enterprises. Unlike structured data, these assets come in diverse formats and rely on context for meaning. Unlocking unstructured information can significantly enhance an organization's institutional knowledge and improve the accuracy and relevance of AI-driven insights.

While unstructured data can be valuable for organizations, it poses challenges for governance. The lack of a fixed schema makes it difficult to automatically catalog, classify or apply consistent access controls. Organizations must identify sensitive information, anonymize personally identifiable data, and maintain an accurate view of the asset’s provenance and quality. If these capabilities are not in place, unstructured information is often not fully leveraged and may be isolated from enterprise analytics and AI processes.

Informatica and NetApp are partnering to bridge the gap between structured and unstructured data management. Together, they will surface valuable metadata from NetApp’s ONTAP unstructured data catalog in Informatica’s Cloud Data Governance Catalog (CDGC) alongside existing structured data assets. This integration will automatically catalog files along with rich file metadata, making unstructured data discoverable for AI and analytics enablement. Mutual customers will be able to discover unstructured content through familiar CDGC catalog searches, apply governance policies consistently and assess data quality and compliance. This will enable customers to accelerate the delivery of generative AI projects and applications while making sure they maintain regulatory and corporate compliance and guidelines.

By bringing ONTAP’s unstructured data capabilities into Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), the partnership reduces the time and cost required to prepare for analytics, machine learning and generative AI. Users can rely on ONTAP’s automated classification and anonymization to protect sensitive information, while automatically created vector embeddings can be easily packaged for RAG pipelines. NetApp’s capabilities mean that teams can curate data across data centers and clouds without moving or copying large files. Together, these innovations empower enterprises to unlock hidden insights, improve decision-making and deliver new AI-driven services more quickly.

Unstructured information represents the majority of modern data, powering AI use cases and unlocking significant business value. Informatica’s comprehensive data governance and catalog capabilities, together with NetApp’s advanced unstructured data management, deliver enterprise governance for all data and AI, giving organizations a unified view of data, structured and unstructured and a foundation for building responsible AI solutions.

In a world where unstructured data represents the next great frontier for AI, this partnership brings that data to life responsibly, intelligently and at scale.

Contact us to learn more.