High-growth tech companies move fast. Their business models depend on scale, speed, and innovation. But this rapid growth comes at a cost: increased risk. High-tech companies face a significant threat of data breaches, with the average cost of a breach reaching $4.88 million in 2024.
As attack surfaces expand and cloud adoption accelerates, security teams are challenged to keep pace without sacrificing protection. The following are the top 10 security concerns facing high-growth tech today—and how security teams can address them with a strategic, data-centric approach with BigID.
1. Lack of Visibility into Sensitive Data
Data is everywhere—across cloud platforms, data lakes, SaaS apps, and developer environments. Risk grows without a clear picture of what sensitive data exists and where it lives. As data generation and collection accelerate, managing and governing that data has become more critical and challenging than ever, especially with varying data types such as structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
BigID provides automated discovery and classification of sensitive data across the entire environment, helping security teams gain visibility and comprehensive insights across all cloud, hybrid, and SaaS environments to secure what matters most.
2. Misconfigurations and Cloud Sprawl
Fast cloud adoption leads to misconfigured storage buckets, unprotected databases, and unmanaged assets. Misconfigurations remain a significant threat to organizational security, even with the broad use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to deploy cloud assets.
Organizations must monitor configuration drifts and implement automated correction mechanisms to effectively mitigate the risk of misconfigurations. BigID helps surface misconfigurations that expose sensitive data and provides actionable insights to remediate them quickly and at scale.
3. Insider Risk
The move to remote and hybrid work has significantly expanded the attack surface, making strong user access and identity management essential for organizational security. Perimeter-based security models fall short in today’s environment, where employees access corporate resources from multiple locations and devices. As unauthorized use or outright theft of intellectual property (IP), such as patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and other proprietary information, makes Zero-trust security models, based on the principle of continuously verifying every user and device, are now critical to modern security strategies. Mismanaged identity access is a root cause in 80% of breaches (Verizon DBIR, 2024). Rapid hiring and tech adoption create identity sprawl. With growing teams that shift rapidly, insider threats become more difficult to monitor.
BigID facilitates the identification and remediation of overexposed data and overprivileged users, supporting the implementation of a zero-trust architecture by ensuring users have access only to the data necessary for their roles.
4. Third-Party and SaaS Risk
Modern business ecosystems are interconnected with vendors, suppliers, and third parties that are essential to the operations of many tech companies. High-growth companies rely on vendors, partners, service providers, and SaaS apps to scale. Each integration introduces potential risk, which is why third-party and supply chain risk management has become a critical concern.
BigID enables organizations to simplify vendor compliance, gain complete visibility into third-party relationships to minimize third-party risk, streamline workflows, and ensure full transparency across vendor relationships to confidently meet data privacy and security obligations.
5. Inadequate Data Retention and Deletion
Growth often comes with technical debt, including forgotten data stores and outdated retention policies. Retention is usually inconsistent, scattered across departments, and enforced manually—if at all. At the same time, minimization and deletion are rarely automated and operationalized. Meanwhile, data sits, multiplies, and exposes the tech companies to unnecessary risk.
BigID helps automate data lifecycle management by identifying redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data and streamlining deletion workflows that reduce the attack surface. With BigID, you can apply and enforce retention rules across all data types with automation from identification to deletion.
6. Fragmented Security Technologies
Security teams often work across disconnected tools with siloed data. But embracing the power of technology and cross-functional teamwork, security teams can effectively navigate the data protection and compliance landscape. When all elements of an integrated system work together in a unified way, they secure the enterprise, improve operational efficiency, and provide actionable business intelligence.
BigID is a best-in-class modern DSP with critical capabilities that integrate with your security stack, which combines security, privacy, and AI data management to deliver consistent, data-driven context that improves decision-making and accelerates remediation.
7. Compliance Fatigue
Complying with regulations is challenging for tech companies, as requirements vary across jurisdictions. Countries and regions are introducing distinct laws for data protection, AI oversight, and digital services, resulting in fragmented and varied compliance obligations.
The compliance burden is real with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, DORA, NIS2, the EU AI Act, and 100+ other regulations, especially when each region and regulation requires something different. All the while, tech and social media companies are the industry leaders for data privacy fines, particularly under the GDPR.
BigID maps discovered data directly to regulatory requirements, enabling policy enforcement, automated data rights fulfillment, consent governance, AI security, and compliance reporting.
8. Shadow Data
Shadow data is an issue for tech companies because data is being created, stored, and managed at an alarming rate outside of an organization’s approved IT systems and infrastructure. Employees can create this data using their devices, third-party applications and services, or save files to local hard drives or cloud storage accounts without authorization. Even developers can generate shadow data in temporary environments, duplicate data sets, and spin up workloads that escape security oversight.
Shadow data can pose a significant security risk for organizations, as tracking, controlling, and protecting it can be challenging. Shadow data can also lead to data leaks and breaches if it contains sensitive or confidential information. BigID automatically and accurately discovers and classifies sensitive data, including shadow data, across on-premises stores, cloud applications, and endpoints. This gives organizations greater visibility into their data landscape, helps them understand where their sensitive data resides, and prioritizes their data protection efforts.
9. Data Breaches and Incident Response
Tech companies manage large volumes of sensitive data—such as customer details, intellectual property, and trade secrets—making them prime targets for breaches that can lead to major financial, legal, and reputational consequences. When a breach happens, time is of the essence.
BigID accelerates incident response by quickly identifying affected data, impacted users, and compliance implications, allowing teams to respond quickly, precisely, and confidently.
10. Increased AI Risk
The risk of bias and unintended consequences rises as AI is increasingly embedded in critical systems. Machine learning models trained on historical data can reinforce and magnify existing biases, resulting in discriminatory outcomes in areas like hiring, lending, and criminal justice.
Organizations adopting AI must focus on training employees on using AI tools, ethical development, thorough bias testing, and preserving human oversight in key decisions. As AI capabilities evolve, the risk of unintended outcomes increases, requiring continuous evaluation and proactive mitigation efforts.
BigID provides complete visibility into your AI model ecosystem, allowing organizations to manage AI-related data effectively and mitigate risks while maximizing the benefits of AI-driven innovation. With BigID, organizations can confidently deploy AI technologies while safeguarding trust, security, and compliance.
Accelerate Your Security with BigID Next
BigID Next is the first modular data platform to address the entirety of data risk across security, regulatory compliance, and AI. It eliminates the need for disparate, siloed solutions by combining the capabilities of DSPM, DLP, data access governance, AI model governance, privacy, data retention, and more — all within a single, cloud-native platform.
To see how BigID can help your organization’s security-by-design initiatives— schedule a 1:1 demo today.
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