Tim Pickard, CMO, Egress Software sat down with Enterprise Times recently to talk about the challenges of securing unstructured data. Pickard is referring to all that data that sits on end user devices and that they share across email and other services.

Protecting data from misuse has been a recurring theme for decades. The problem is that many of the technologies available are intrusive. Pickard believes that part of the problem is the breakdown of the perimeter. Cloud is a major part of the problem. The ready access and willingness to use to cloud services means that IT can no longer see where the data is. This changes how we see the control point around data protection. The solution is to treat the user as their own perimeter and help them.

To help the user, Pickard says we need to provide the user with guiderails around how they use the data. Part of this is better and more targeted AI. Pickard talked about how Egress was looking at users emails to build up a picture of who they communicate with and when. This allows the system to spot anomalies such as suddenly sending files to an unknown user. It will flag that for checking. Walking the line between useful and ‘getting in the way’ is never easy.

Pickard also talks about the challenge of data classification and secure collaboration. This is a real challenge for legal firms.

To hear more of what Pickard had to say listen to the podcast.

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listen to the podcast (below) or download the podcast to your local device and then listen there