Every business generates data, requires data, and bleeds data. In today’s AI-driven world, however, that data becomes both a boon and a threat. Scams and hacking attempts are more sophisticated than ever. Not utilizing or securing your data well enough could leave your business in the dust. You have to adapt to a data-first world, and while AI tools do wonders working with unstructured data, that just won’t fly when it comes to managing your business.
The fact is, your data is not likely secure. In June 2025, a massive, record-breaking data breach happened, meaning over 16 billion passwords across some of the biggest firms from Facebook to Google have been exposed.
Unless you are an expert in that field and meticulous about your datasphere, there are likely wayward or unsecured datasets, and until you find them all, sort them all, and secure them all, your business could be at risk.
With this in mind, here are some key principles, tools, and methods to secure your dataspace once and for all.
Understanding the Challenges
There are several challenges with locating, sorting, and securing all your data. Understanding these challenges up front can help you appropriately strategize how to approach each issue based on your business.
- Your data is growing exponentially, and storing it properly has become an increasingly difficult challenge.
- You have a complex datasphere that includes cloud, on-premises, and even hybrid approaches.
- You suspect you have shadow data (data you have but don’t know you have), which is ripe for being hacked, stolen, or misused.
- You cannot confidently say all of your data adheres to local, national, or international compliance requirements.
Setting Up Your Tools
Manually finding, sorting, and securing your data, particularly when it grows every day, is not just resource-intensive; it’s nigh impossible. That is why the next step is to find the tools that will streamline the process effectively. This tool needs to be able to handle:
- Discovery
- Classification
- Access limiting
- Security
Some tools, like data security posture management, or DSPM, handle most of the steps automatically. Today, the top DSPM tools can discover your datastores across environments and automatically sort and secure it in a few key ways, from finding stale access (unused employee logins, third-party accounts) to labelling and sorting data, to deleted duplicates, to even securing the data itself with up to 95% accuracy.
Reviewing Results
Having a tool provide the bulk of the work automatically, 24/7, can help you stay on top of your data identification and classification, but as with any automated tool, you must assume there is a margin of error. For example, having a single DSPM across several cloud datasets could cause errors due to the various security policies each system uses. There may also be hiccups with integrating legacy software or false positives. Having a highly trained professional or team to review your data can help you:
- Fully secure your system
- Prevent misclassification
- Regularly review access permissions (and reduce access where possible).
The combination of DSPM monitoring and human oversight will help eliminate the risk of shadow and duplicate data and help you identify the weak points in your data security, allowing you to effectively clean up your dataspace once and for all.
Related Articles:
- Cloud Data Security Program for Small Businesses: A Simple Guide
- Essential Preventative Measures to Protect Your Data
- How to Recover Data from Formatted Hard Drive
- Recovering from a Data Breach: Essential Steps for Businesses
- Top 11 Data Security Platforms for Protecting Your Sensitive Information
- Data Protection and Privacy Consulting: Protecting Your Digital Footprint
- The Importance of Secure Data Transfers & How to Achieve It
- 9 Tips for Protecting Your Company and Consumer Data
