An unsecured AWS S3 bucket with 5.5 million business files was recently discovered by security researchers at vpnMentor. All of these files were publicly available without any password protection or other security protocols attached to them. This kind of thing happens regularly with cloud service providers, and it often occurs when IT teams neglect to set security and compliance rules within their cloud environments.

I sometimes wish someone with gravitas had said, “There is no content without security.” That would have looked good coming from Churchill or Lincoln. But their lack of foresight about content services doesn’t diminish a very important fact, one that carries its own brand of import: the importance of security and governance for a company’s critical data.

Last year, Capital One showed the world why data governance is so important when it was the victim of a massive data breach that exposed the personal data of 106 million customers. It is still one of the biggest hacks ever recorded, and the company has now been fined $80 million by banking regulators. A “what’s in your wallet” meme would work great here, but let’s keep this classy.

Chaos is never good for business, but the reality is that it’s the state in which many companies live on a daily basis. The global pandemic shut down offices and dispersed workforces to employees’ homes and other socially-distanced locations. Without data governance plans to support remote workers, employees scavenged for, and used, tools and processes that helped them get their jobs done, often with little regard for long-time implications or risk to the company.