Securing Enterprise Data: The Essential and Practical Customer Journey

By Nick LeBrun - Global Field Success

November 20, 2025 4 Minute Read

I scrolled across a provocative LinkedIn post in late October claiming that enterprises have simply given up on a single-platform approach for their entire cybersecurity stack. Instead, it suggested that enterprises are adopting a more realistic strategy: relying on a handful of vendors that are each dedicated to a single security domain. For example, Vendor A covers Threat Protection & Incident Response, Vendor B covers Identity & Access, Vendor C covers Application Security, Vendor D covers Data Protection & Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), and so on. 

The real dilemma – What are the implications for enterprises or governments that are realizing that their main security vendor won’t realistically (at least anytime soon) be helping them meet critical and diverse use cases ranging from business continuity to data visibility across cloud environments to email security? Outlining a sensible customer journey across these domains and use cases is key. This blog examines how enterprises can practically approach the journey of building and optimizing their Data Protection, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and DSPM programs.

This dispersion of data across SaaS, IaaS, Private Apps, Shadow Web & AI sites, and endpoints presents significant security and compliance challenges. Securing this pervasive data landscape is a continuous, multi-phased journey that begins with understanding the environment and culminates in highly precise DLP controls. I’ve learned a lot in my seven years at Skyhigh Security through hearing customer stories and digging into analyst reports, and I’m excited to bring these experiences to life in this customer journey blog.

The Foundation: Achieving Comprehensive Data Visibility

The first, and most critical, step on this journey is achieving comprehensive visibility into data movement. You cannot protect what you cannot see or do not know. This phase involves gaining a unified view of all data traversing the organization’s network perimeter and cloud environments – a key component of a DSPM solution. This includes understanding what data resides in sanctioned SaaS applications (e.g., Microsoft, Slack, Salesforce), what is being stored in public cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS object storage, databases), and how users (or even 3rd parties!) are interacting with sensitive information within your internal private applications. It’s 2025, and customers need to extend their data visibility to evaluate what and how much data is uploaded into Shadow IT and AI (e.g., SendSpace, Fireflies.ai)  Without this foundational understanding of data location and flow, security efforts are merely guesswork. 

Phase 2: Contextual Monitoring and Policy Establishment

Once visibility is established, the focus shifts to continuous monitoring and contextual analysis. It is essential to monitor who is accessing files or data, when they are doing it, and where the data is going. This monitoring should happen within the context of established security policies and compliance mandates like GDPR, PDPA (Singapore), LGPD (Brazil), HIPAA (Healthcare). For instance, a security team needs to know if an employee is sharing a pre-IPO sensitive financial document with an unauthorized 3rd party over an unsanctioned Telegram app. This phase identifies anomalies, risky behaviors, and potential policy violations before a breach occurs, laying the groundwork for effective controls.

Phase 3: Implementing Data Control and Loss Prevention

The third phase is the active implementation of proactive data controls—the enforcement mechanisms that turn policy into action. This is where security solutions actively stop unauthorized sharing of sensitive documents via cloud services or email. Controls must also block risky uploads to unsanctioned cloud storage sites or social media and prevent file downloads onto unauthorized or unmanaged mobile devices. These controls are vital for maintaining a strong security posture, ensuring that data exposure is minimized across all access vectors—SaaS, IaaS, and the web—by creating a protective barrier between the data and the threat.

Phase 4: Elevating DLP with Precision

The final, sophisticated stage of the data security journey involves implementing precision into Data Loss Prevention (DLP). Generic DLP policies that rely on keywords or simple regular expressions often result in high false-positive rates, creating alert fatigue. Next-generation DLP utilizes advanced techniques to ensure maximum accuracy. Exact Data Match (EDM) allows organizations to fingerprint a database of known sensitive data (like customer lists or specific financial records) and block transfers that precisely match those fingerprints. Similarly, Index Document Matching (IDM) creates a unique index of an entire document or set of documents, preventing the unauthorized sharing of that specific file, regardless of minor edits or formatting changes. Deploying these precision methods ensures that only actual policy violations are flagged, delivering an efficient and effective final layer of data protection.

استنتاج

Foundation → Achieving Comprehensive Data Visibility

Phase 2 → Contextual Monitoring and Policy Establishment

Phase 3 → Implementing Data Control and Loss Prevention

Phase 4 → Elevating DLP with Precision

At Skyhigh Security, we realize that Data Protection & DSPM are a significant and necessary undertaking for our customers and prospects. Skyhigh Security is a leader and top performer in Data Protection & DSPM. We have sales teams, customer success managers, and services to guide your enterprise along the journey. Read more about our recognition and value we bring through a recent DSPM analyst report from Omdia!

Reach out today to contact a sales team member or see a demo.

You can also learn more about our platform here: https://www.skyhighsecurity.com/ 

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