Do you think your organization is too small to attract the attention of cybercriminals? That your systems are discreet enough to fly under the radar? Or that adding one more security tool will be enough to protect your operations?
The bad news is that these old assumptions no longer hold up.
Artificial intelligence can now identify vulnerabilities faster and at a much larger scale. Aging systems, forgotten access rights and poorly classified data are becoming easier to uncover.
As cybersecurity expert François Tremblay puts it:
“Security through obscurity has always been a bad bet; now AI shines a light everywhere.”
The question is no longer simply whether you have the right cybersecurity tools. Instead, ask yourself: do you truly know what you are trying to protect?
Start with your data
Do you know what data your organization has? Where it is stored? Who can access it? Which data is sensitive? And above all, who is responsible for it?
If you hesitated over one or two of these questions, you are probably not alone. A Netwrix1 report found that fewer than one-third of surveyed organizations can quickly identify who has access to their sensitive data.
Over time, data accumulates across applications, cloud platforms, shared files and systems operated by different vendors. Some of it is well documented; some, much less so. And some may be sitting in an aging system that no one wants to touch, or in a system that only a handful of experts in your organization understand and know how to use.
The problem is simple: it is difficult to protect data when you do not know it exists, what it is worth or how sensitive it is.
This is where data governance comes in. It helps classify data, understand its value, identify who is responsible for it and establish the rules governing its use.
Data governance expert Nicolas Gidas neatly sums up how governance and cybersecurity complement each other:
“Data governance tells you what to protect, why it matters and who is responsible for it, while cybersecurity determines how to protect it.”
In other words, governance helps you take inventory of the house before installing the alarm system and motion detectors.
Then AI enters the house
Now imagine adding a conversational assistant that can search all your internal information.
Convenient, isn’t it?
Yes, provided the assistant knows which doors it is allowed to open.
If your data is not properly classified, documented and secured, the assistant could disclose confidential information to someone who should not have access to it (for example, the CEO’s salary to a new intern). It could also generate an answer based on an outdated, incomplete or contradictory document (which of the countless versions is the right one?).
Once again, the issue is not just artificial intelligence. It also lies in the data it is given and the rules governing how that data is used.
As Nicolas Gidas puts it: “AI accelerates value creation, but data governance ensures its reliability, security and long-term viability.”
Data governance sets the rules of the game: it defines responsibilities, quality criteria, access rights and compliance requirements so that AI can operate responsibly and securely.
AI therefore acts like a powerful spotlight. It can illuminate the right information and speed up your work, but it can also expose disorder that your organization had previously managed to keep in the shadows.
Cybercriminals have access to AI too
Artificial intelligence does more than improve how you work. It also expands the capabilities of those seeking to exploit your vulnerabilities.
AI-assisted scanning and penetration-testing tools can identify poorly maintained or inadequately secured technologies more quickly. New attack models are faster and more powerful.
That makes it harder to reassure yourself with statements such as:
- “We are too small to attract attention.”
- “No one will find this vulnerability.”
- “This system still works, so why replace it?”
Just because a weakness has not yet been exploited does not mean it is invisible.
According to François Tremblay, one of the most concerning risks remains service disruption caused, deliberately or otherwise, by the failure of vulnerable systems whose aging has been poorly managed.
An aging system is therefore more than a technological nuisance. If it supports a critical activity, its failure can prevent your organization from fulfilling its mission.
Adding another security tool will not solve everything
When a new threat emerges, the first instinct is often to add another technology solution.
Another tool, another control, another layer of protection.
François Tremblay compares this approach to the Swiss cheese model:
“We add layers of cheese that we know have holes, hoping that if we stack enough slices, we will eventually cover every gap.”
Each layer may reduce part of the risk, but piling on tools does not necessarily fix unclear responsibilities, unknown data, inconsistent processes or poorly maintained systems.
After all, security is not a product you can buy by the kilogram, megabyte or gigahertz. It is a quality that must be built into your systems, services, processes and employees’ cybersecurity hygiene, according to the requirements of their roles.
To determine which measures you truly need, you must understand your mission, your critical activities and the technologies that support them. Human, administrative and technological measures can then be aligned with what really matters to your organization.
Your organization is no longer a fortress
There was a time when cybersecurity could be pictured as a great wall surrounding the organization.
Everything inside was considered safe, while anything coming from outside was treated as a potential threat.
That model increasingly fails to reflect today’s reality.
Your employees work remotely, your data moves between multiple applications, your teams use cloud platforms, your vendors access certain systems, your clients exchange information with you, and artificial intelligence is gradually connecting to this ecosystem.
Your organization therefore looks less like a fortress and more like an open environment through which people, technologies and data flow.
The challenge is to apply consistent security measures throughout this ecosystem. You may invest heavily in protecting a critical application while leaving a forgotten access point or a poorly managed dependency elsewhere.
François Tremblay illustrates the problem simply:
“It’s like putting three locks on the front door while leaving a back window open.”
A distributed environment can be secure. However, it must be designed that way, with measures tailored to access points, interconnections, vendors, clients and the risks specific to each system.
What happens when your vendor goes offline?
The proliferation of cloud services and vendors creates another challenge: dependency.
How do you keep operating if your collaboration tools stop working? If your customer relationship management platform becomes unavailable? If an AI service that is essential to your operations temporarily goes down?
These are not merely technology questions; they are business continuity questions.
Cybersecurity is therefore no longer just about preventing a malicious actor from accessing your systems. It must also enable you to continue operating when a technology, vendor or infrastructure becomes unavailable.
It is better to think through these scenarios before they happen.
A major outage is rarely the best time to discover that no contingency plan was in place.
Knowing what you are protecting is essential, but it is only part of the equation. Even with strong security measures, no technology environment is immune to an outage, vulnerability or incident.
The question then becomes: is your organization designed to keep operating when something goes wrong?
This is where another essential dimension of cybersecurity comes into play: resilience. In our second article, we explore how to build it and strengthen your organization’s ability to maintain operations, adapt and evolve its cybersecurity posture.
References
- https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/40-of-mid-sized-organizations-report-unauthorized-access-to-sensitive-data-netwrix-research-finds-302907903.html According to this article, over 70% of companies are facing the same situation.
