Presented by Capital One Data security remains one of the least mature domains in enterprise cybersecurity. According to IBM, 35% of breaches in 2025 involved unmanaged data source or “shadow data.” This reveals a systemic lack of basic data awareness. It’s not because of a lack of tooling or investment. It’s because many organizations still struggle with the most fundamental questions: What data do we have? Where does it live? How does it move? And who is responsible for it? In an increasingly complex ecosystem of data sources, cloud platforms, SaaS applications, APIs, and AI models, those questions are only becoming more difficult to answer. Closing the maturity gap in data security demands a cultural shift where security is no longer treated as an afterthought. Instead, protection is embedded throughout the full data lifecycle, grounded in a robust inventory, clear classification, and scalable mechanisms that translate policy into automated guardrails.Visibility as the foundationThe most persistent barrier to data security maturity is basic visibility. Organizations often focus on how much data they hold, but not on what that data is made up of. Does it contain personally identifiable information (PII)? Financial data? Health information? Intellectual property? Without this level of understanding and inventory, it’s a lot tougher to implement meaningful protection. This can be avoided, however, by prioritizing enterprise capabilities that can detect sensitive data at scale across a large and varied footprint. D …
