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Varonis report highlights risks of AI on data security

May 23, 2025

The State of Data Security Report shares findings from 1,000 real-world IT environments to uncover the dark side of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) boom.

Varonis' State of Data Security Report: Exposing Data at Risk in the Age of AI.

A new report from Varonis reveals that 99% of organizations have sensitive data exposed to AI. This report, titled State of Data Security Report: Quantifying AI’s Impact on Data Risk, examines how sensitive information is vulnerable to AI tools due to misconfigurations, overly permissive access, and other data security gaps.

“The productivity gains of AI are real — and so is the data security risk,” said Varonis CEO, President, and Co-Founder Yaki Faitelson. “CIOs and CISOs face enormous pressure to adopt AI at warp speed, which is driving the adoption of data security platforms. AI runs on data, and taking a data-centric approach to security is critical to avoid an AI-related data breach.”

Varonis analyzed data risk assessments from 1,000 organizations, providing empirical evidence of risk. The dataset covered nearly 10 billion cloud resources — over 20 petabytes of data — within popular Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Box, Salesforce, and others.

Varonis found that in the organizations examined:

  • 99% have sensitive data unnecessarily exposed to AI tools.
  • 90% of sensitive cloud data, including AI training data, is open and accessible to AI tools.
  • 98% have unverified apps within their environments.
  • 1 in 7 do not enforce Multifactor Authentication (MFA) across SaaS and multi-cloud environments.
  • 88% have ghost users within their environments.

Additional resources are available at the State of Data Security Report: Exposing Data at Risk in the Age of AI.

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