Virtually every company with a substantial cloud data environment has some measure of overexposed data. The consequences can range from benign to neutral, annoying or even catastrophic. To make the news, the level and consequences of overexposed data must be spectacular — a word that very few security executives would like to hear used about their operations.
One of the more damaging consequences of overexposed data is a breach that steals, destroys or ransoms sensitive data. A shocking number of breaches start off with cloud storage buckets (e.g. Amazon S3), which for any number of reasons can be full of sensitive data that the information technology (IT) team is unaware of. While there are plenty of solutions for securing sensitive data by location (an individual file server or storage device, for example), that doesn’t account for the tons of sensitive data that is casually shared within an enterprise.