Decentralized Data Risks: How Cloud Sprawl is Changing the Game for CISOs

Managing cloud sprawl has become increasingly difficult for CISOs and their data teams. With sensitive information spread across multiple cloud providers, dozens of SaaS tools, shadow IT environments, and new AI pipelines duplicating data for training and analysis, keeping track of it all can seem like an uphill task. Even the most prominent organizations aren’t safe.

A recent example highlighting the complexity of managing cloud sprawl is the Hertz Corporation breach, which was disclosed in April 2025. Attackers exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in a third-party file transfer platform used by Hertz, Dollar, and Thrifty, leading to the exposure of sensitive data for over a million individuals. The compromised information included names, contact details, dates of birth, credit card numbers, driver’s licenses, and even government IDs and medical information for some.

This incident underscores how organizations with data spread across multiple vendors and cloud environments can struggle to maintain visibility and control, especially when third-party tools are involved in their workflows.

As data spreads across more environments, traditional security tools aren’t keeping up. Visibility is fragmented. Remediation is manual. And the risks, from unauthorized access and data leaks to compliance violations and breach escalation, are more daunting than ever.

To stay ahead, CISOs need centralized visibility into their data and decentralized enforcement at the source. This article breaks down why that model matters, where traditional data security tools fall short, and how to regain control in a multi-cloud and hybrid world.

Cloud and Hybrid Sprawl Is the New Norm, and It’s Breaking Data Security

Cloud and hybrid sprawl have become the default for modern enterprises. As teams rapidly adopt new tools and expand their tech stacks to stay competitive, they spin up new environments and duplicate data across systems. It’s a tradeoff that often feels necessary to support growth, analytics, and AI development and adoption.

However, as data continues to spread, security teams are left chasing shadows without unified visibility or control. Cloud sprawl, hybrid infrastructure, developer autonomy, regulatory complexity, and AI/ML workloads all contribute to a fragmented data landscape where no single team has complete oversight. Sensitive data ends up scattered across hundreds of systems, many of which are invisible to central security teams.

And as new tools are added, legacy systems rarely get fully decommissioned. They keep storing critical data but sit outside the scope of active monitoring and enforcement. That’s where blind spots form and where attackers find opportunity. This growing overlap between modern cloud infrastructure and aging on-prem systems creates a patchwork of environments with inconsistent controls, fragmented ownership, and varying levels of risk exposure.

In environments like these, assuming that data is protected just because it lives behind a login or inside a trusted tool is a risky bet. To secure it, organizations need unified visibility and actionable control. But getting there is harder than it sounds, and there are a few reasons why.

Challenges in Securing Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Environments

Security teams are dealing with growing attack surfaces, fragmented visibility across tools, multiple cloud environments, and mounting pressure to prove compliance in systems they don’t fully control. These challenges define the new reality of securing data across an organization.

Increased Attack Surface

Every new tool, cloud environment, or integration introduces risk. As sensitive data flows between environments, often duplicated or transformed along the way, attack surfaces grow in ways that are hard to see, let alone control. A misconfigured S3 bucket, an over-permissioned SaaS app, or an unmonitored legacy database can all become entry points for attackers.

According to Microsoft’s 2024 State of Multicloud Security Report, more than half of surveyed organizations were exposed to at least one attack path in 2023, with the average data footprint containing 351 attack paths. These attack paths often result from internet exposure and insecure credentials, leading to potential compute abuse, data exposure, and credential compromise.

To address these attack paths, security teams need solutions that continuously discover sensitive data across every environment: cloud, SaaS, and on-prem. These solutions need to go beyond point-in-time scans and CSV exports. They need to provide a unified, real-time map of where sensitive data lives, how it flows, and where it’s at risk. That’s the first step toward reducing exposure before it becomes a problem.

Complexity in Visibility and Control

Legacy data security tools weren’t built for today’s fragmented environments. Most offer siloed visibility: one dashboard for cloud storage, another for SaaS applications, and yet another for on-prem systems. Stitching these insights together takes time and manual effort, which delays response times and increases the risk of missed threats. That’s part of the reason why only 22% of organizations can respond to cloud breaches in under 60 minutes.

Security teams need a centralized way to understand their data posture across cloud, SaaS, and on-prem environments. One control plane with consistent insight, no matter where the data lives. That kind of visibility enables faster detection, smarter prioritization, and tighter control.

Compliance Gaps

Fragmented data environments make compliance a moving target. Without comprehensive visibility into where sensitive data resides, how it’s accessed, and who controls it, organizations are vulnerable to policy violations, data residency issues, and audit failures, all carrying significant financial and legal repercussions.

A 2023 report by Veritas reinforces this risk, with 46% of organizations naming data security — including ransomware, data loss, and data theft — as their top concern. These aren’t just theoretical risks: 40% said such threats have already caused the most financial and reputational damage to their organizations.

To address compliance proactively, security teams require solutions that detect regulatory risks — such as access misconfigurations and policy violations — and remediate them at the source.

The Key to Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Security? Centralized Visibility and Decentralized Enforcement

Securing sensitive data across fragmented environments requires a shift in how teams approach the problem. Centralized visibility paired with decentralized enforcement has emerged as the most effective model for securing data at scale.

This approach is exactly what it sounds like: maintain a single, unified view of sensitive data across all environments and enable enforcement to happen where the data lives. It’s about knowing what’s at risk and giving teams the ability to fix issues quickly without needing to route every action through a central security team.

And it works. Here’s how:

• Less redundant work across siloed security teams: With centralized data visibility, security teams aren’t completing work in silos. They’re working from a shared, accurate view of the organization’s entire data footprint. This eliminates the need for constant cross-team syncs, overlapping tools, or redundant playbooks.
• Consistent enforcement of policies across environments: Without a centralized control plane, every environment becomes its own island, with its own rules and exceptions. When enforcement is decentralized but policy is unified, teams get the best of both worlds: consistency and speed. Security teams can define rules once and push them everywhere, ensuring no environment gets left behind.
• Accelerated response to incidents, privacy requests, and audits: Centralized visibility empowers security teams to instantly locate sensitive data and assess exposure. Decentralized enforcement means they can take action directly within the systems that matter, no ticketing backlog or approval bottlenecks required.
• Reduced manual burden on security and compliance teams: Security teams don’t have to chase down other teams or manually patch every gap. With automated enforcement and clear ownership, remediation becomes a shared responsibility.

For organizations navigating complex multi-cloud and hybrid systems, this model is the preferred method to scale data protection without burning out the security team or introducing operational bottlenecks.

How Teleskope Empowers CISOs to Secure Their Data Footprint

Teleskope unifies discovery and classification across cloud and data environments, no matter how distributed it is. The platform continuously scans structured and unstructured data across major cloud providers, SaaS platforms, and on-prem systems without requiring data movement.

Whether it’s a Snowflake warehouse, a Google Drive folder, or a legacy file server, Teleskope detects and classifies sensitive data in real time. Its AI-powered classification engine is built to handle real-world complexity: identifying PII, PHI, financial data, source code, and more across various formats, schemas, and languages. This enables security teams to maintain an always-updated inventory of where sensitive data lives, how it’s flowing, and who has access.

That visibility feeds into intelligent, policy-driven automation. Teleskope can remediate issues at the source: revoking access, quarantining exposed files, deleting stale data, or flagging high-risk movement for review. These actions can be automated or routed through the right owner, striking the ideal balance between speed and control.

The Atlantic, for example, used Teleskope to dramatically reduce the time and effort required to fulfill data deletion requests. Instead of relying on manual lookups across fragmented systems, their team now automatically identifies and removes user data across their environment, cutting time spent on deletion workflows by 95%. That kind of operational efficiency supports compliance and frees up privacy and security teams to focus on higher-value work.

In a world where decentralization is accelerating, Teleskope gives security teams and CISOs the clarity to know where data is vulnerable and the control to fix it quickly without creating operational drag.

Decentralized Data Demands Centralized Intelligence

Data decentralization isn’t going away. If anything, it’s accelerating, driven by the needs of fast-moving teams, evolving business models, and new data-hungry technologies. But the more fragmented your data becomes, the more unified your visibility and control need to be.

You can’t solve decentralized problems with decentralized tools. Today’s security teams and CISOs need centralized intelligence: a way to see across their entire data estate, understand what’s at risk, and act quickly without slowing teams down.

That’s the philosophy behind Teleskope. The platform brings together continuous discovery, automated remediation, and proactive prevention into a unified platform built for modern cloud environments.

Book a call to see how Teleskope can bring clarity and control to your data security strategy.