Organisations are curating and creating more and more valuable data. This data is being created in unstructured formats, such as email, spreadsheets, and document and media files.

This data is very powerful, but it also represents a risk to organisations if it falls into the wrong hands. Data breaches cause reputational damage and commercial damage, and they can breach regulations causing large fines.

One of the key risk areas relates to who has access to sensitive data. Active directory weaknesses are often the primary targets for attackers who want to exfiltrate or infiltrate an organisation’s data.

Organisations are under increasing pressure due to remote working and the number of new applications they need to support. Each new application and each new remote workstation is a new vulnerability.

Ensuring that each user has the most appropriate level of access to each file is a very large and complex problem. The wrong level of access can overly restrict your organisation’s efficiency and the value it gets from its data.

Knowing your data is key—where your data is, what it is and how it’s growing over time. To implement an effective, least-privilege model, you need to first understand your data.

Another big challenge is visibility into who has access to sensitive files and building suitable reporting that provides context and insight into the data and the extent of access to that data.