How data sprawl can create blind spots that weaken your cyber resilience

Do you know where all your sensitive data resides across your enterprise? And who can access it?

Data scattered across cloud platforms, SaaS apps, and AI pipelines can create blind spots where sensitive data can lie unprotected. These blind spots can weaken your cyber resilience. If sensitive data isn’t properly protected, secured, and governed—it can pose a business risk. That’s why you need clear accountability and visibility across your entire data estate to protect revenue, reputation, and meet regulatory compliance.

Gaining clear accountability and visibility into sensitive data

Many organizations inadvertently expand their exposure when:

• Sensitive data is unintentionally pulled into unprotected workflows.

• Data is copied into new locations as part of “normal” operations.

• AI accesses sensitive data and uses it in non-compliant or insecure ways.

None of this requires malicious intent (although attackers certainly do look to exploit misconfigurations and blind spots). It just requires speed, complexity, and incomplete visibility—which can describe most enterprises on any given day.

To counteract this, organizations must first gain clear visibility into their data estate with continuous discovery and classification. Continuous discovery means knowing where data lives across SaaS, cloud data stores, collaboration systems, and data platforms—continuously, not quarterly. This data should then be classified to reflect business impact. For example, organizations should identify regulated data, secrets/credentials, customer data, financials, IP, and other “high sensitivity” data

Control

Attackers increasingly focus on finding the fastest path to valuable data, not just compromising systems for the sake of it. Cohesity’s CERT is actively seeing a shift towards extortion rather than encryption. This means attackers are looking to exfiltrate data, steal credentials, and establish persistence without triggering obvious disruptions to the network or infrastructure. That attack path often runs through:

• Misconfigurations and unmanaged storage locations

• Excessive privileges and overly broad access

• Forgotten datasets and “temporary” copies that became permanent

• Shared links, external collaboration, and permissive default settings

In addition to needing a clear view into sensitive data and how it may be exposed, organizations need control over their sensitive data. Otherwise, these weaknesses persist longer and are easier for attackers to exploit. The most damaging incidents are often those in which the organization didn’t realize the data was accessible in the first place.

That’s why access and exposure context is key to applying controls. Once you’ve identified sensitive data, it’s about understanding whether it’s reachable. With access and exposure context, teams should adjust accordingly who (or what) can access it, how broadly, through which sharing mechanisms, and with what risky configurations.

As you look to remediate data security risks, your prioritization should align with risk. Focus on remediation where sensitivity and exposure intersect. Teams don’t need a list of 10 million files. They need the top problems that need to be addressed immediately.

Regulatory compliance

Regulatory requirements around data classification, residency, retention, and access governance are getting stricter across regions and industries. Of course, these requirements can carry costly penalties for non-compliance. Regulators (and customers) increasingly expect organizations to demonstrate control, not just claim it. 

That means being able to continuously answer questions like:

• What regulated data do we have, and where is it stored?

• Who can access it, and is that access appropriate?

• Is it protected in a way that aligns to policy and obligation?

• Can we provide evidence for all of the above (and not just snapshots)?

 While laws regulating data differ, they all aim to protect sensitive data and ensure only authorized individuals have access. Once you have both visibility and control of regulated data, you can meet regulatory compliance in both proactive security and reactive recovery scenarios.

In practice, make sure you can protect the most sensitive data and, in turn, prioritize it for clean recoveries. Be able to quickly understand what is affected by a breach or attack. This satisfies regulators, auditors, and customers alike and is also critical for achieving cyber resilience.

Take control of sensitive data, reduce risk, and empower cyber resilience

As data proliferates and AI adoption accelerates, data security and cyber resilience must keep pace. The first step is simple: understand where sensitive data lives, how it’s shared, and what’s exposed—so you can reduce risk and recover faster when something goes wrong. Better visibility also speeds AI. Teams spend less time debating risk and more time deploying AI with guardrails, security, and compliance.

As leaders in AI-powered data security, Cohesity is innovating powerful solutions and integrations to help organizations remain secure and strengthen cyber resilience. That’s why we work with  Cyera, a pioneer and a leader in AI-native data security platforms, to provide powerful integrations that enable organizations to gain control over enterprise risk and to empower both data security and cyber resilience.

To learn more about how the combination of Cohesity Data Cloud and Cyera’s AI-native Data Security Platform enables organizations to use best-in-class platforms to achieve streamlined, automated, and comprehensive cyber resilience, read the latest Omdia white paper.