Astrophysicists hypothesize that as much as 85 percent of our universe is composed of dark matter, the enigmatic subatomic particles that we can't physically see with our eyes, yet we can infer their existence.

Today's modern enterprise—with its sprawling and interconnected systems and distributed applications that extend across geographies, ecosystems, and supply chains—possesses a similar "dark data," where data exists everywhere yet is often obscured from sight. In fact, dark data is estimated to comprise 80 percent or more of most companies' total data volume.

According to Gartner, dark data is "the information assets organizations collect, process, and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes." Dark data is most often comprised of unstructured data—data that is user-generated and not stored in tidy applications. Examples of unstructured dark data include everything from documents and messages in Slack or Teams, to file metadata, multimedia files, or legacy data from former employees or mergers and acquisitions (M&As).