A Look at Data Security in the Next 5 Years

The Future of Data Governance

There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day, resulting in your company’s digital footprint quickly growing at an exponential rate year after year. The scale and velocity of this growth creates a struggle for how organizations manage and secure all of that data. Unstructured data poses a unique challenge. Forty percent¹ of businesses say they need an effective way to manage their unstructured data on a daily basis. If you’re utilizing a variety of apps, cloud, and on-premises repositories to collect regulated or personal information, sign documents, manage projects, pay bills, and perform all the other operational activities required of today’s enterprise, the data trail generated is hard to follow and control.

Is there a sustainable, repeatable way to manage and protect your most valuable data? For organizations seeking to find peace of mind for data security across multiple systems, the answer is “yes”, and the solution can be found in three things: content intelligence, visibility, and control. 

You can’t secure what you can’t identify. Businesses need to first focus on what data is at risk, and know where it resides. Security leaders must start by asking:

• What do I need to protect?
• What is sensitive?
• What is important?

With so many channels for how content is accessed and shared, it has become increasingly difficult for businesses to maintain complete visibility and control, which can make them much more susceptible to being breached. Whether an internal user unintentionally shares sensitive content or ransomware infiltrates your organization, the hard costs of being breached can be crippling.

The future of data governance will require a secure solution to protect your data while being able to handle complexity at scale. Business leaders and their IT administrators should invest in a comprehensive platform with as much automation as possible. Unlike older legacy systems, your platform leverages machine learning, providing your team with the necessary content intelligence to understand the actual content of the document, which will help to remediate any future data loss.

In fact, did you know that 11% of all files are shared externally, and that10% of all files contain some kind of regulated or sensitive data? It’s critical to know where those two overlap, so you can understand your risk. We can expect to see major changes in the next wave of cybersecurity challenges for businesses in the next five years and the years to come. 

With the right mindset to manage and control your unstructured data, companies can protect confidential data with a scalable strategy that uses content intelligence. Cloud-based content intelligence is the way of the future, allowing your IT infrastructure to deploy revolutionary capabilities for advanced collaboration, visibility, analytics, compliance, and strong governance must be integrated in order to be successful.

Want to learn more about how you can accelerate your knowledge in building secure solutions in the cloud? Join me for our Egnyte - Tech Talk in Raleigh, NC on Thursday, November 14th, 2019.