AI is a Ticking Time Bomb for Your Data, Reveals New Report From Varonis

 A new report from Varonis reveals 99% of organizations have sensitive data exposed to AI. The State of Data Security Report: Quantifying AI’s Impact on Data Risk examines how much sensitive information is exposed and vulnerable to AI tools due to misconfigurations, overly permissive access, and other data security gaps.

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“The productivity gains of AI are real — and so is the data security risk,” said Varonis CEO, President, and Co-Founder Yaki Faitelson. “CIOs and CISOs face enormous pressure to adopt AI at warp speed, which is driving the adoption of data security platforms. AI runs on data, and taking a data-centric approach to security is critical to avoid an AI-related data breach.”

Varonis analyzed data risk assessments from 1,000 organizations — providing empirical evidence of risk, not conclusions based on AI readiness surveys and polls. The dataset included nearly 10 billion cloud resources — over 20 petabytes of data — within popular IaaS and SaaS applications and services, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Box, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Okta, Databricks, Slack, Snowflake, Zoom, and many others.

Also Read: The Evolution of Data Engineering: Making Data AI-Ready

In the organizations examined, Varonis found:

• 99% have sensitive data unnecessarily exposed to AI tools.
• 90% of sensitive cloud data, including AI training data, is open and accessible to AI tools.
• 98% have unverified apps, including shadow AI, within their environments.
• 1 in 7 do not enforce MFA across SaaS and multi-cloud environments.
• 88% have ghost users lurking in their environments.

Varonis is the leader in data security, fighting a different battle than conventional cybersecurity companies. Our cloud-native Data Security Platform continuously discovers and classifies critical data, removes exposures, and detects advanced threats with AI-powered automation.

Thousands of organizations worldwide trust Varonis to defend their data wherever it lives — across SaaS, IaaS, and hybrid cloud environments. Customers use Varonis to automate a wide range of security outcomes, including data security posture management (DSPM), data classification, data access governance (DAG), data detection and response (DDR), data loss prevention (DLP), AI security, and insider risk management.

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