Lynne Murray | Director of Product Marketing for Data Security
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Lynne Murray | Director of Product Marketing for Data Security
More About This Author >
The latest IDC report on data security raises an important point: if organizations are looking to level up their old data security solutions, now might be the time for a wholesale strategy change.
Companies are at a critical juncture where data is concerned. Increasingly, businesses need it, cloud environments store it, compliance wants to protect it, and legacy tools can’t seem to catch up with it. These problems have come to a head, as noted in IDC’s Spotlight Paper, Improving Business Outcomes with Unified Full-Spectrum Data Security.
Unified data security solutions are clearly becoming the answer to current data-oriented dilemmas. Organizations can remove data security complexity, accelerate time to compliance, and secure their cloud migrations with the Thales CipherTrust Data Security Platform.
Data Security Needs are Intensifying
Data is everywhere. It is both structured and unstructured and stored anywhere, from data lakes to SaaS applications to cloud infrastructure. Not only must it be protected for compliance purposes and customer privacy, but data is now the lifeblood of real-time business decisions and successful outcomes. As such, it is an invaluable piece of company property (insofar as companies have consent to use it).
Data security has never been more of a business priority than it is right now. Security teams more than ever are tasked with keeping data safe in complex data infrastructures against:
- Exposure: Hijacked keys and credentials result from poor data encryption, exposing sensitive data.
- Loss: Data exfiltration, whether malicious or unintentional, ruins brand reputation and siphons energy and resources for remediation that pull away from profits.
- Excessive permissions: The desire for speed and team enablement can lead to unnecessary permissions. These can be abused when employees accidentally (or intentionally) use those permissions to grant access to important data stores.
- Unavailability: It doesn’t take a data breach for companies to lose access to business-critical information. Expired certificates can also do the trick.
IDC reports that those risks are exacerbated by the following factors:
- Data wears many hats: Multifunctional data means that simply shutting off access to keep data safe is not an option. That data needs to be secure and usable.
- Data takes many forms: This ruins the simplicity of only protecting data at rest, or only in transit, or only in use. Today’s organizations need the resources to do it all.
- Data is in many places: The danger is that data often resides in places nobody realizes. Data sprawl means threats are lurking where security teams may not see.
- Data is overwhelmingly present: If the above challenges weren’t sufficient, the sheer volume of data businesses have to contend with would challenge any tools not designed with contemporary data problems in mind.
Data Drives Business: Risk and Reward
The pressure is on now that data drives business decisions like never before. Eighty percent of CISOs now report directly to the CEO, making security business company business. While this is the break most security leaders always dreamed of, it comes with increased accountability and higher stakes.
However, the benefit of this alignment is a cheat sheet to risk prioritization. Alignment between security initiatives and business objectives reduces data risks, and here’s why. With laundry lists of vulnerabilities to get through and a host of alerts and investigations on the backlog, how do SOCs know they are doing what matters most?
Understanding which risks are the most pressing to the business helps put things in perspective, elevating some fixes to the top of the list while others take a back seat. But this is where problems begin. How can you prioritize data security solutions if, for example, you don’t know the location of your data? 24% of the Thales 2025 Data Threat Report respondents admitted that they are not confident in locating their data.
Short-term vs Long-term Approach
As data threats have grown more complex, organizations have relied on point products to solve specific problems. While effective in isolation, maintaining a fragmented stack comes at a cost. Each tool requires its own expertise, integrations, and updates—draining already limited resources. The IDC Spotlight notes that such environments often become “complex and expensive security infrastructures”, demanding continuous management while offering limited visibility and inconsistent policy enforcement.
The result is inefficiency and duplication. Teams struggle to correlate insights across tools, respond to incidents quickly, and align security with broader business objectives. According to the Thales Data Threat Report, nearly two-thirds of organizations (61%) use five or more tools for data discovery, monitoring, or classification, while 57% use five or more key managers, driving up operational costs and creating gaps that adversaries can exploit, especially as AI-driven threats accelerate.
In contrast, a long-term, unified approach delivers both cost-effectiveness and resilience. Consolidating data security capabilities onto integrated platforms reduces redundancies, simplifies compliance, and provides end-to-end visibility. It allows security teams to prioritize risks, automate responses, and align protection with organizational goals—transforming data security from a cost center into a driver of business value.
Grow with CipherTrust Data Security Platform
If security is to support business goals, single solutions are not flexible enough. They create siloes, drum up more work, and take more time to go from initial detection to ultimate response, especially as a modern data security problem will be a puzzle spread out over a patchwork of systems and environments. Running back and forth to put together the pieces is not operating at the speed of businesses.
The IDC report asserts, “A unified data security platform has...benefits that help the business meet its objectives.” These unique elements support security and business alignment, and they are found in Thales CipherTrust Data Security Platform.
Through the following features, CipherTrust DSP enables business-centric cybersecurity:
- Covering every data use case: Unify privacy, governance, compliance, and security across on-premises and multi-cloud environments for both structured and unstructured data.
- Protecting sensitive data: Discover, classify, monitor, and enforce policies to keep critical information secure wherever it resides.
- Policy enforcement made easy: Apply protection through format-preserving encryption, tokenization, and dynamic data masking—without disrupting data use.
- Securing data at rest and in transit: Centralized key and secrets management with built-in encryption, tokenization, and ransomware detection.
- AI-driven efficiency: Automate investigation and remediation with intelligent, end-to-end workflows across any environment.
- Holistic risk prioritization: See and act on risks in real time across the entire attack surface.
- Compliance made simple: Generate instant audit trails and compliance reports with unified visibility across all frameworks.
And more, like quantum-resistant encryption and flexible licensing to meet the unique needs of enterprise organizations.
Today’s data-driven threats can undermine more than just consumer privacy and audits; they can have a directly negative impact on a business’ bottom line. To see what a unified, consolidated data security platform could do for your organization, download the IDC report in full.