Concentric AI 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 Semantic Intelligence DSPM solution, Concentric AI captured user data in production deployments during 2022 from companies in the technology, financial and healthcare 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% increase). Link-based risky sharing was up to 100,000 documents per enterprise, up from 81,000 in 2021.
Concentric is the first company to identify and quantify risk in both 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 every day.
Similar to previous Concentric AI Data Risk Reports, this new 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% 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 erroneously classified and inappropriately accessible by other employees on average per enterprise. To illustrate, nearly 25% of all unstructured data contained personally identifiable information (PII) and was not marked appropriately.
- More than 35% of files processed were duplicates (15%) or near-duplicates (20%). 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% 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.
The full 2022 report is available from Concentric AI free of charge at https://concentric.ai/pdf/concentric-data-risk-report/.
