Cybersecurity Insiders and Netskope outline investigation and evidence impacts of data security tool sprawl

Cybersecurity Insiders and Netskope report that many organizations run large, fragmented stacks for protecting sensitive data, forcing analysts to query many systems, correlate logs manually, and struggle to produce auditable evidence under time limits.

Research overview

The figures come from the 2026 Unified Data Security Report produced by Cybersecurity Insiders and Netskope, based on organizations with 2,500 or more employees.

Respondents describe layered defenses across email, cloud, endpoint, and SaaS developed over several budget cycles, with the coverage not translating into coordination across tools.

Key findings

Fifty-eight percent of organizations run 11 or more separate data security tools, while 7% describe the stack as fully unified.

Sixty percent characterize their approach to protecting sensitive data as moderately or highly fragmented, and 23% report that their tools share almost no context with each other.

Investigation burden from tool sprawl

Forty-five percent of security teams query six or more systems per investigation, and 16% query more than 10.

Respondents describe investigations into external data sharing that can require access logs and activity events from CASB, endpoint DLP, email metadata, and identity provider sources, each with its own timestamp and export process.

Operational costs and investigation coverage

When asked what fragmentation costs them, 44% cite the manual work of correlating data across systems, followed by inconsistent policy enforcement (42%) and visibility gaps between tools (40%).

Only 9% of organizations can fully investigate “nearly all” sensitive-data alerts, while 56% investigate half or fewer.

Although automation is expected to reduce effort, 10% describe their automation as extensive.

Where visibility gaps concentrate

The report identifies differences in visibility, with email at 36% and AI tools at 10% based on respondent answers.

Only 7% of organizations report tracking sensitive data moving between applications in real time, and the report describes scenarios where a cross-workflow involving SaaS, a private app, and an AI assistant crosses multiple visibility boundaries.

For transformed data, 9% of security teams say they can reliably recognize sensitive data after it is copied, summarized, or rewritten, and 17% still rely on exact-match detection that misses those scenarios.

Regulatory and legal evidence under deadline

Fragmented tooling also affects response when regulators, auditors, or legal teams seek an account of what happened, with 12% able to quickly produce a comprehensive, auditable chain of custody.

Forty-six percent report needing significant manual effort across systems or struggling to produce sufficient evidence.

Under GDPR’s 72-hour notification window, the report says 27% of organizations take weeks to reconstruct the sensitive data path or never have enough evidence to do so, which can force notification decisions before the technical picture is complete.

Coordination as the proposed remedy

The report frames the issue as coordination rather than just consolidation, arguing that buying fewer tools is not the approach and that consolidation alone is not portrayed as sufficient.

It recommends that architecture ensure classification, policy, and evidence travel with sensitive data as it moves, changes form, and lands in new environments, so analysts focus on exposure assessment rather than reconstructing timelines.

The report characterizes the number of consoles an analyst opens during routine investigations as a starting question for data security roadmaps, including whether that number is rising or falling.

This “Blog Signals brief” summarizes the reported findings from Cybersecurity Insiders and Netskope’s 2026 Unified Data Security Report about fragmented data security tool stacks, investigation load, visibility gaps, and evidence challenges under notification timelines; it is a fact-based summary of the vendor blog.

The original article was written by Decision Insights Editorial.