Concentric AI, a vendor of intelligent AI-based solutions for autonomous data security posture management (DSPM), announced the availability of its 2022 Data Risk Report, which highlights a continued rise in oversharing of business-critical and sensitive documents. The report revealed the number of overshared files rose 60 percent in 2022 compared to 2021, highlighting the significant impact of hybrid remote work, cloud migration and information sprawl across on-premises and cloud data, as well as email and messaging environments on data security.
Using its trademarked Semantic Intelligence DSPM solution, Concentric AI captured user data in production deployments during 2022 from companies in the technology, financial, and health care sectors to reveal how organizations create, use and manage data. The company leveraged findings from more than 500 TB of unstructured data scanned in real-world environments to discover business-critical and sensitive documents that are overshared via link sharing, inappropriate external sharing, internal permission misconfigurations and incomplete/incorrect document classifications. Oversharing increases the risk an organization will lose data, violate compliance or privacy mandates, or experience cybercrime.
Statistics highlighted in the 2022 Data Risk Report reveal that organizations averaged 802,000 files at-risk due to oversharing. That translates to 402 at-risk files per employee (up significantly from 251 files per employee in 2021, a 60-percent increase). Link-based risky sharing is up to 100,000 documents per enterprise, up from 81,000 in 2021.
Concentric identifies and quantifies risk in structured and unstructured data using deep learning. Its solution autonomously provides an accurate and detailed semantic understanding of the millions of contracts, financial documents, payroll, M&A plans, product roadmaps and source code files used by organizations. Like previous Concentric AI Data Risk Reports, this 2022 report analyzed production data and reflects actual user practices and real-world data risk exposures. Additional statistics in the 2022 report include:
- Nearly 32 percent of unstructured data was business-critical – that’s 500 million files in an average organization. Of those business-critical files, 16 percent could be seen by internal or external users who should not have access.
- 87,000 business-critical files were classified erroneously and inappropriately accessible by other employees on average per enterprise. To illustrate, nearly 25 percent of all unstructured data contained PII and was not marked appropriately.
- More than 35 percent of files processed were duplicates (15 percent) or near-duplicates (20 percent). Maintaining multiple variant copies of sensitive information (often with insecure file permissions, prohibited locations, or improper file classifications) can create legal and regulatory risks, as well as significant unnecessary storage costs.
- 83 percent of at-risk files were overshared with users or groups within the company, while 17 percent of business-critical files were overshared with external third parties.
- More than 52,000 documents were shared by employees with their personal email accounts.
- 160,000 documents were shared with everyone in the company.
For more information, see https://www.concentric.ai.
