As software eats the world, more and more companies are investing in outsourced development and cloud data storage (data warehouses and lakes) for quicker development cycles and broader business access. Both scenarios create a perfect storm for significantly increasing risk to the business. And as the needs of the business to access the data expands, it leads to less scrutiny and less control on the data. Here are a few observations I’ve made that open companies to additional data risk. Production data used for development and testing – Software development inherently requires a minimum amount of production data during the building and testing process. Due to the demand, development teams frequently access sensitive data from internal corporate resources to meet development milestones and quality benchmarks.
