Cloud and distributed computing, remote or mobile work, and the emergence of generative AI, taken together, are what make this a moment of profound risk. Workers in both government and the private sector now rely every day on dozens of cloud apps, each ripe for account theft, each with its own vulnerabilities. Data is distributed in such a way as to make it impossible to protect it with old “cybersecurity perimeter” strategies, and many of the nuggets of data we work with on our devices are near a “share” button that makes it troublingly easy for data, including the most confidential and sensitive data, to wander around the world without due care.
