A reminder to question your plaintext data

Cybersecurity Awareness Month highlights common safeguards such as strong passwords, phishing awareness, and multi-factor authentication, while Evervault emphasizes a broader principle: sensitive data should not remain in plaintext within organizational systems unless necessary. The post argues that traditional security and compliance practices, including PCI DSS and HIPAA controls, generally focus on protecting plaintext data after collection rather than minimizing its presence. It recommends auditing the full lifecycle of sensitive information across databases, logs, analytics tools, backups, support systems, documentation, and third-party services; questioning whether each system requires raw values; and deleting unnecessary data or encrypting required data before it enters internal systems. Encryption can reduce the impact of breaches and potentially narrow compliance scope by limiting where usable cardholder, personal, banking, or health data exists. Evervault presents its products as tools for encrypting data before collection, retaining encryption keys separately, decrypting values only for authorized external use, and processing sensitive information without exposing it in customer environments.

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