With the massive amounts of data organizations now ingest, store, and analyze comes a massive responsibility to monitor, manage, and protect it. Unfortunately, many businesses are functioning with little insight into how their data is stored and who is accessing it — and their overly complex data architecture can turn those challenges into unnecessary risk, and if not addressed, can lead to security breaches and compliance issues. This hidden tax on innovation is known as DIRT — the Data & Innovation Recurring Tax — which includes symptoms such as prolonged time spent on patching and addressing vulnerabilities, rampant data duplication making compliance a nightmare, and increased complexity that makes it difficult for teams to develop and roll out best-in-class features. A simple and unified data architecture can help alleviate these issues by providing a single overarching security policy and implementation, eliminating silos and data duplication, and streamlining audit logs and access control. By addressing the root causes of DIRT, organizations can reduce their innovation tax and improve their overall security posture and compliance with regulations.