You need to know the actual information being communicated in the data to know how it should be treated. Is it a regulated form of information, such as a social security number, or is it the name of a secret project accidentally dropped in an email? Is it relevant to the intended purpose?

Where is the data coming from? Is this a user-generated document? Who created it? When? Why? Is it data generated by a sensor; is it data from an external feed; is it backup data or being retrieved from storage? If you’re a security professional, these all need to be secured differently. If you’re a CFO, you need to know the financial impact if that data is stolen or stops flowing.

Where is the data going? Is it going to multiple places within the organization, being sent out over the internet, or going to a compromised website? What foreign countries is data unknowingly flowing to? Why? Should it be confined to a specific workgroup or geographic location?

If so, that’s a good start. If not, that points to a gap in security.

What happens to data once it is created or accessed? Who else sees it and uses it, and for what purpose?

Even if it was accessed from a repository by an authorized user, data quickly proliferates across departments. Frequently, that same data is used by people who were never authorized to access it themselves. Should people using the data or its derivatives have it?

Data is often used for things it was never originally intended. For example, marketing video clips ending up in an LLM can skew algorithm results for an analysis use case. Financial data might be used to create a graph for customer presentation purposes and accidentally expose sensitive information.

Was restricted-access data used for analysis, then pasted into a presentation, shared with corporate communications and extracted and used in a press release? When is data no longer current or accurate and where is it living across the organization?

Data doesn’t have to flow to a Russian URL to breach security policy. How about that ER patient who took a photo of his X-ray on the monitor and sent it out to himself over the hospital’s secure Wi-Fi network? There goes HIPAA-regulated data. Yeah—we’ve seen that.

Unless you know your data and how it’s supposed to behave, you won’t know when something is anomalous. For example, if data in a normal communication stream between two known points suddenly is replicated and sent to a new destination, how would you know? If encrypted data going to a security control isn’t being decrypted correctly, that system isn’t protecting you like you thought it was. Data behavior can be baselined and anomalies alerted—giving you a head start on potential attackers.

Flying Cloud can show you the state of your data with positive proof and chain-of-custody accountability. You still need to make decisions about how to protect and manage it, but now you can confidently answer questions about your data with ledgerized proof.