I’m both excited and concerned to write about data security as one of the hot trends to monitor in 2021. Data security is a tough topic to summarize and I’d argue it may be the most misunderstood category in security right now. We’re a raw industry that has been shaken up multiple times for years. We’ve gotten micro-services, Agile software development, public cloud, GDPR, multi-cloud, work-from-home, federal regulations and SaaS applications all disrupting how we lived and worked.

It’s gotten to the point now that if you were to ask a CISO what they’re doing to protect their data, you’d get different answers; there is no consistency. Yet, if you were to ask those same folks who the leading data storage, analytics, processes and vendors were, clear market leaders would quickly emerge.