As organizations increasingly rely on digital tools, they are also increasing the risk they take with their data security. Data, which remains one of a company’s most precious resources, is no longer centralized or easily contained behind perimeter firewalls. It moves across cloud platforms, between teams and vendors, and through hundreds of apps used by employees every day, often with varying security permissions. This is all happening without consistent IT oversight and has created a new era of security, which isn’t just about firewalls or VPNs. It’s more of a mindset shift regarding control, visibility, and trust at the data layer.
This data security shift is most evident in how employees are interacting with company data. Self-service business intelligence (BI), embedded analytics, and remote access tools empower employees to simplify their workflows and increase their efficiency. But they also present serious risks with every spreadsheet export, unmanaged integration, or unauthorized dashboard. All these moving pieces, often magnified with thousands of employees dispersed globally, can open the door to data exposure even if no large breach occurs.
Security risks presented by shadow IT
Shadow IT has always been a challenge for enterprise teams, but the rise of AI like generative AI and large language models (LLMs) is escalating the problem. Employees copy-pasting sensitive financial or customer data into tools like ChatGPT may not even realize they’re creating vulnerabilities. In trying to work more efficiently, they may inadvertently leak proprietary insights or violate compliance mandates. Every organization should have a policy that outlines information sharing guidelines and any prohibited apps.
This isn’t hypothetical. As IT Brew recently reported, attacks like those by the Scattered Spider group have shown how modern cyber threats target not just infrastructure, but the social behaviors and tools that employees use day-to-day. Sophisticated phishing, social engineering, and lateral movement across fragmented systems means employees can unwittingly become vulnerable access points for attackers.
Smarter governance is the enterprise’s best defense
Organizations can’t reverse the decentralization of data, and they shouldn’t have to. Self-service analytics, remote collaboration, and moving information globally are all vital to agility and competitiveness. But they do require a new kind of security approach.
Traditional perimeter-based models like firewalls, VPNs, and restricted physical networks all are built around a single point of entry. Because of the complexity of systems, that assumption no longer holds. Today’s users access data from cloud platforms, hybrid ERP systems, and third-party apps, frequently on personal devices.
To address this, organizations are shifting to context-aware security and role-based governance. These approaches go beyond the traditional approach of protecting systems and ensures users see only what they’re allowed to see based on job role, security clearance, location, or status.
Security should be baked into the mindset of innovation, and organizations can encourage their employees to use available tools, but keep within specific limits. Organizations that take a heavy-handed, restrictive approach risk encouraging more shadow IT and workarounds. The answer is to enable teams with secure, governed, real-time access to data so they don’t have to resort to unsafe tools in the first place.
Many public and private sector organizations have invested in cloud transformation, but see the modernization effort ending there. True modernization isn’t just about moving workloads but instead rethinking how data is governed, accessed, and used. It’s a cultural shift that requires collaboration between IT, security, finance, and the teams making data-driven decisions. Most importantly, it requires rethinking data security not as a static barrier, but as a dynamic, embedded layer in every workflow, application, and organizational thought process.
