How Do You Put a Price On Security and Compliance?
Every expenditure in an enterprise must be justified, and the questions posed by executives with budget authority can vary. Is the request a must-have or nice-to-have? What’s the ROI? Are there alternatives? What happens if we don’t make this purchase?
Protegrity understands why answers to these and similar questions are essential – especially when senior management reviewing the request may not match the technical depth and hands-on experience of their data and security architects and governance teams. While no senior executive will ever say that security and governance compliance are not high priorities, their willingness to sign off on a large PO requires more than a list of specs and features from the vendor.
Senior leaders look at the bigger picture, and they measure success in business terms: support for strategic objectives; cost-benefit analysis; ROI, ALE, SLAs.
That’s why we’ve put together a four-part blog that describes how we and some of our customers make a business case for adopting Protegrity solutions.
This first blog provides an overview of the challenge, with the other three providing greater detail.
Making a safe path for agentic AI
Enterprises come to Protegrity for a variety of reasons, but most of them boil down to one critical need: to maximize the value of data while protecting against unauthorized access and ensuring proper governance.
For example, the global senior vice president of a financial services company says: “The value of the investment in Protegrity is that it has enabled our LOBs to do things with data they could not have done otherwise— and do those things efficiently.”
The rapid adoption of AI adds complexity to the task of reaching this objective, with enterprises facing several sobering questions, such as:
- Can we use all relevant data to enable AI, analytics, automation, and agentic workflows without risking exposure of sensitive information?
- How do we build AI and analytics pipelines that scale safely and predictably without sacrificing accuracy?
- How do we ensure that data can be easily audited, reproduced, and governed consistently once it enters AI workflows?
- Can we convert AI from a “black box risk surface” into a governed, auditable, and trustworthy system that security teams can confidently operationalize?
- Is it possible to avoid making a tradeoff between enforcing rules for security and compliance and giving all authorized uses maximum access to relevant data?
These questions are answered by adopting Protegrity’s secure agentic AI solutions. Protegrity operationalizes data integrity by shifting control away from models and applications to anchoring it in the data layer.
Sensitive data is protected before it ever reaches AI systems, governed consistently as it flows across AI pipelines and agents, and enforced deterministically at runtime. This removes reliance on prompt discipline, model behavior, or downstream review.
Because security travels with the data — instead of surrounding it — AI systems can safely access protected information, reason with greater accuracy, and operate at scale without exposing sensitive data. In short, AI models can safely ingest everything and leak nothing.
This allows organizations to empower their cross-functional teams to use data creatively to deliver better customer experiences, develop innovative products and services, unlock insights, and make fully informed decisions.
Sounds good, right? But how do security and governance teams convince senior management of the value of Protegrity? How do they move beyond answering “what does it cost?” to explaining “here’s what it contributes”?
Listening to the experiences of our customers, we hear three themes:
- Reducing cost – This includes cutting costs in absolute terms, as well as avoiding expenditures in the first place.
- Increasing revenue – Putting data to innovative uses creates new revenue streams, supports upselling and cross-selling, and engages partners in developing additional opportunities.
- Minimizing risk – Strengthened security and governance measures reduce the chances of data leaks and regulatory infractions. The cost of prevention is greater than that of a cure.
These insights add to the findings of an earlier Forrester study that calculated one customer’s total economic return from adopting Protegrity.
The subsequent blogs in this series will explore each of these three themes in more detail. In the meantime, learn how enterprises are benefitting from Protegrity solutions by reading some customer case studies.