AI Data Security

Data security is shifting from a compliance afterthought into the primary control plane for putting AI into production—Copilot, Azure AI Search, Unity Catalog, Snowflake Horizon, and Bedrock Guardrails all push ACLs, labels, classification, and retrieval authorization upstream into the call chain. RAG and agents do not rebuild the permission system; they amplify the existing over-sharing baked into SharePoint, email, CRM, and databases, with DSPM, DLP, DDR, access governance, and RAG permissions strung into one chain. Machine identities already outnumber human ones 82:1 (CyberArk), and CrowdStrike's $740 million acquisition of SGNL pulls NHI and AI identity into continuous control. Watch rating: the durable profit pool sits in the control plane (permission graph, label engine, policy engine, retrieval authorization, AI gateway) rather than in scanning, with direct beneficiaries backed by financial evidence including Varonis, CyberArk, Snowflake, MongoDB, Elastic, Trend Micro, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, while AI-native challengers such as Cyera (valued at $9 billion), BigID, Sentra, Concentric, Securiti, Privacera, Veza, Noma, and Lasso carry strong narratives but thinner revenue proof.