The Paradigm Shift: Why Traditional Data Security Breaks in the AI Era

For ~20 years we built walls—first around networks, then around identities. AI dissolves those walls. Data is now generated, transformed, and moved by copilots and agents through paths legacy tools can’t see.

Three eras at a glance

  • Network Era: Perimeter = the corporate network. Guard ports, packets, gateways.
  • Cloud/SaaS Era: Perimeter = identity. Guard accounts, roles, OAuth scopes.
  • AI Era (now): No fixed walls. Prompts, context windows, embeddings/vector stores, tool calls create invisible routes that cross apps and teams at machine speed.

What changes now

  • Incidents aren’t single events; they’re journeys (source → transform → retrieval → model → output).
  • “Detect by keyword” fails; we need semantic understanding + lineage.
  • Controls must move to the prompt/retrieval/agent layers and tie back to identity (human and non-human).

Part 2: The New Threat Landscape: Deconstructing AI-Native Data Risk, is on the way…