Data: The New Oil, or the Next Disaster?

Once upon a time, a travel company in New York sent an email to a hotel in Paris with details about two guests’ arrival. The data included their names, passport scans, credit card details, and flight information. The guests had a magical trip, flew home, and everyone lived happily ever after. Unfortunately, that story is an unrealistic fairytale. A happy ending is increasingly unlikely when sensitive personal data is involved, mishandled, or inadvertently left unprotected. In this case, the company would likely have violated data sovereignty laws, such as GDPR in Europe, as well as New York’s SHIELD Act, requiring businesses to protect consumer data with strong data security. Failure to comply with those regulations exposes companies to penalties, highlighting the risks of operating without adequate data protection. In 2023, for example, Meta was fined $1.2 billion euros for transferring European user data to the USA in violation of GDPR.? Data creates huge value but can also be a painful, dual-edged sword. While data is our economy’s ”new oil,” ?if you can’t identify, map, and secure data, it could become your “Exxon Valdez” in several painful ways:

• Hacking: The average cost of a data breach in 2024 reached $4.88 million according to IBM’s latest Cost of a Data Breach Report, a 10% increase from the previous year.
• DSARs: A single consumer Data Subject Access Request can take enterprises weeks to handle, and not responding risks costly fines under GDPR and regulations like the New York Privacy Act.
• AI: Enterprises that train LLMs with proprietary data may inadvertently leak valuable information, exposing companies to new vulnerabilities and compliance risks.
• Management: Data storage and cyber insurance costs continue to rise with data volume. Without proper visibility, enterprises store and insure millions of redundant records, inflating operational costs.

Why Is Managing Enterprise Data So Challenging?

Data is scattered across various company silos and data formats. It can be on-premises, on local servers, mainframes, on employee devices, or in cloud apps and cloud storage. It can be structured in a customer database or unstructured in email. Often, the same data exists in multiple locations simultaneously.? Discovering, categorizing, and securing company data has been difficult. Manual sorting is impractically inefficient, and while first-generation Data Access Governance (DAG) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools offer valuable automation, they also generate excessive false positives, requiring expert intervention.? This is why I joined 1touch.io as CEO, leveraging a decade of tech security leadership, including my experience at crowdsourced security platform Bugcrowd. 1touch creates a contextual “segment of one” for each sensitive data element―whether it’s user information, IoT devices, or credit cards – helping companies know exactly what data they have, where all copies exist, and how sensitive it is. Many benefits provided by 1touch.io are nothing short of stunning:

• High Accuracy: 1touch.io achieves 98.6% accuracy for structured and unstructured data, dramatically outperforming traditional DAG and DLP solutions.
• Efficient DSAR Management: The average DSAR response time drops from 86 days to just 3 clicks.
• Cost Savings: Clients save up to seven times what they pay 1touch.io in cyber insurance costs alone and multiples more in data storage expense reduction.

As a result, 1touch.io doubled its 2023 revenue in the first half of 2024 with zero churn, helping companies like IBM, Chubb, Prudential, Cigna, American Family Insurance, Marriott, and Wyndham protect sensitive data. This ensures that individuals, families, and SMBs can more safely live, work, and vacation around the globe. And isn’t that the secure and happy ending we’ve all been hoping for?