Data security’s next chapter: from siloed controls to a unified growth engine
Blog: OpenText Blogs

Enterprises are racing to modernize multi-hybrid cloud infrastructures and to operationalize AI. The result: data volume, velocity, and value are exploding. But so is risk. Boards are now treating data security as a strategic imperative, not a back-office hygiene function. The signals are blunt: privacy and AI-related data risk tops enterprise concerns; GDPR penalties are climbing; breach costs are material and only growing; and most enterprise data is unstructured and hard to govern.
Against this backdrop, the winners won’t be those who bolt on another tool. They’ll be the organizations that establish a unified data security fabric that makes discovery continuous, protection persistent, and compliance operational.
We will explore these core themes in our upcoming webinar, “Securing Data in a Multi-Cloud, Risk-Centric, and AI-Driven World.”
Why traditional approaches are breaking
Every new connection expands the potential attack surface: multi-hybrid clouds, SaaS sprawl, remaining on-premises systems, third-party APIs, and AI pipelines. At the same time, fragmented controls across these estates create blind spots in discovery, classification, and policy enforcement.
In other words, two root causes are resulting in persistent complexity and cost:
- Scale & variability across structured and unstructured data in hybrid/multi-cloud environments, which outpaces the ability of legacy discovery and classification tools to keep pace.
- Performance & functionality gaps in tools that aren’t sufficient to meet the demands of AI-driven workloads, generating false positives that drain both security and IT teams.
Practitioners feel the paradox: more tools yet less control, which results in breaches and failed audits, delays, manual rework, productivity hits, and rising protection costs.
A better path: unify discovery, protection, and governance
Leading organizations are moving from point solutions to a platform approach that facilitates four critical outcomes:
- Risk & Exposure Management to understand and prioritize the potential blast radius.
- Lifecycle & Retention Control to minimize sensitive data and reduce both risk and cost.
- Cloud & AI Data Protection that travels with the data across environments.
- Privacy & Regulatory Compliance automated through discovery, classification, and remediation.
This isn’t theory. Customers report faster time-to-value, simpler audits, and measurable savings, such as multi-million-dollar storage reductions after deduplication and precise categorization of sprawling estates of sensitive data.
Practical steps you can start now
Your roadmap to an improved data security posture can be incremental, and it can start now. Specific steps you can take include:
- Automating discovery & classification across all repositories, including cloud object stores, SaaS, data lakes, and mainframe-adjacent estates.
- Unifying protection & governance with encryption, access governance, and policy enforcement that’s cloud-agnostic and data-in-place.
- Operationalizing compliance with centralized reporting, lineage, and continuous controls that survive audits and scale with AI initiatives.
These moves create the conditions for responsible AI and resilient operations, so you can realize new competitive advantages without trading privacy or trust.
What you’ll learn in the webinar
Join Krista Case, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, OpenText, and Phil Sewell, Strategic Security Architect, for a pragmatic session on building a unified foundation that strengthens resilience, compliance, and trust. Expect real-world guidance and proof points.
We’ll cover:
- Practical steps to reduce data risk across hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems.
- Strategies to simplify compliance while enabling responsible data use.
- How unified platforms close discovery, protection, and governance gaps while lowering operational complexity.
You’ll leave with a clear roadmap to make data security a catalyst for growth – protecting what matters most, complying with expanding mandates, and empowering the business to move faster, smarter, and safer.
Why this matters now
- Board-level urgency. Privacy and AI-driven data risk are now top enterprise concerns. Breach costs and fines are rising. Unstructured data dominates the estate. The status quo is untenable.
- AI at scale. Without data-centric controls such as tokenization, format-preserving encryption, and policy-aware security techniques, AI increases exposure and audit scope.
- Operational efficiency. Consolidation onto a unified platform reduces tool sprawl, accelerates investigations, simplifies audits, and readies the organization for AI, all while lowering costs and complexities.
Who should attend?
CISOs, CIOs, Heads of Data/Analytics, and Security Operations leaders responsible for data-driven programs in regulated or complex multi-cloud environments.
If you’re accountable for both enabling AI and passing audits—this session is for you.
Register
Seats are limited. Save your spot for “Securing Data in a Multi-Cloud, Risk-Centric, and AI-Driven World.” You’ll get practical guidance, a step-by-step roadmap, and stories from the field that you can take straight to your next board update.
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