Concentric Inc, a leading vendor in intelligent AI-based solutions for protecting business-critical data, today announced the availability of its second quarterly Data Risk Report, which highlights a dramatic rise in oversharing of business-critical and sensitive documents. The report revealed the number of overshared files jumped by 52 percent compared to the previous quarterly report, during an industry-wide transition to a work-from-home environment due to COVID-19.
Using its Semantic Intelligence™ solution, the company scanned more than 50 million files to discover business-critical and sensitive documents that are overshared via link sharing, inappropriate external sharing, internal permission misconfigurations, and incomplete/incorrect document classifications. Oversharing increases the risk an organization will lose data, violate compliance or privacy mandates, or experience cybercrime.
Concentric is the first company to identify and quantify risk in unstructured data using deep learning. Its solution autonomously provides an accurate and detailed semantic understanding of the millions of contracts, financial documents, payroll, M&A plans, product roadmaps and source code used by organizations every day. Following the first published quarterly Data Risk Report, this new report analyzed production data and reflects actual user practices and real-world data risk exposures. Additional statistics in the report also point to a sharp rise in oversharing during the three-month sample period earlier this year:
- Organizations averaged 105 business-critical files that were overshared per employee. That’s up from 38 files per employee reported in the first quarterly Data Risk Report.
- Sharing of documents using web links was up to an average of 45,000 files per organization, up from 35,000 files per organization in the last report.
- These changes took place in an environment where the total number of files per organization stayed steady at approximately 10.2 million, with 27 percent of those files categorized or identified as business critical.
As Concentric documents an expansion of the risk surface, the FBI also noted a quadrupling of cybercrime reports during the COVID-19 pandemic (https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-says-cybercrime-reports-quadrupled-during-covid-19-pandemic/). These trends suggest an elevated risk environment from both threat and target perspectives. Concentric’s data-based analysis of files and how they are used quantifies associated risks and pinpoints at-risk data so organizations can take steps to protect it.
To compile the report, Concentric leveraged its Semantic Intelligence solution to autonomously categorize and assess documents created and managed by end users. The result is the industry’s most complete, detailed and accurate view into how risks associated with oversharing are changing over time. The full report is available from Concentric free of charge at https://landing.concentric.ai/drr_q2_2020_pr.
“We expect to see work-from-home practices for the foreseeable future,” said Karthik Krishnan, CEO of Concentric. “Like many in the industry, our own engineering team, for example, has replaced white board design sessions with online sharing and collaboration. That’s one of many ways remote work changes the data sharing dynamic. Fortunately, Concentric’s Semantic Intelligence solution delivers the data risk insights enterprises need to help employees work productively without sacrificing security.”
About Concentric
Concentric discovers and protects business critical content stored in unstructured data, which according to Gartner represents 80 percent of all corporate data. Sensitive business data Concentric protects includes intellectual property, financial documents, PII/PCI content in documents, business confidential data (strategy plans, product roadmaps, contracts, blueprints), stored in Office365/Sharepoint, Windows file shares, Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. The Concentric Semantic Intelligence™ solution uses deep learning to develop a semantic level understanding of the content in each document and leverages that data to discover business sensitive content, surface high risk data, and remediate issues without relying on upfront rules or complex configuration. Concentric is venture backed by leading Silicon Valley VCs and is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. For more information, see https://www.concentric.ai
Concentric and Semantic Intelligence™ are or may be registered trademarks of Concentric AI, Inc. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
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