The cornerstone of your sensitive data protection plan is a thorough understanding of your data, which will assist you identify where to implement data security rules. However, once you have a good understanding of your data, you must appropriately classify it. An organization’s data is treated as if it were all the same without security classification: Because data hasn’t been properly categorized, you can’t tell how important it is. Failure to classify data raises the risk of sensitive data being compromised throughout the data security lifecycle. It also raises the potential that security restrictions are being applied to material that isn’t actually sensitive.