IDC Study: Cyera Customers Cut Data Risk and See 441% ROI

Every organization wants to move faster with AI, but doing that safely requires confidence in the data behind it. Teams need to know what data they have, where it lives, who or what can access it, and where it creates risk before they connect it to AI tools and agents.

Cyera commissioned IDC to quantify its business impact. Based on interviews with Cyera customers across multiple industries, the IDC study found that Cyera delivered a 441% ROI over three years, with a payback period of just 4.5 months.

IDC’s research found this value is derived from several key factors:

• 78% more data threats identified and remediated
• 51% greater security team efficiency through accurate data intelligence that helped teams spend less time investigating and more time remediating
• $3.3 million in average annual benefit per organization from fewer security incidents, greater capacity from existing teams, consolidated tooling, and lower storage costs
• 99% more shadow data, 71% more confidential data, and 55% more sensitive data visible and classified

At Cyera, we believe organizations can only secure AI tools and agents at scale if they start with the right data foundation. That means understanding and protecting data at rest, in motion, and in use. Cyera brings DSPM and DLP together on shared data intelligence, so the same context that helps teams understand sensitive data and risk can also help them protect that data as it moves and is used. That intelligence extends to Cyera Agent Guardian, helping teams govern what agents can access and do. Together, DSPM, DLP, and Agent Guardian make up Cyera’s unified platform for securing data and AI.

As one manufacturing customer told IDC: "Cyera's platform consolidates our posture, identity access, and DLP needs in a single solution, and we're very confident that their discovery tools allow us to inventory all our data and cross-reference it with our identities so we can categorize it, manage risk, and enforce policies to ensure it doesn't get into the wrong hands. It also helps us protect our customer-facing AI technologies by keeping the wrong data out of the public domain, which enables us to more confidently accelerate our AI adoption."

Here's what IDC found.

Find the data that matters

Most security teams are responsible for more sensitive data than they can reliably find, classify, and prioritize. Legacy discovery and classification processes are often slow, manual, and hard to trust, leaving teams with fragmented visibility, forced to validate findings, chase false positives, and piece together context before they can decide what matters.

According to the IDC study, Cyera outperformed customers' previous solutions on the speed and accuracy of data discovery and classification, helping organizations improve data visibility by 80% and risk prioritization by 66%. Customers also gained visibility into and classified 99% more shadow data, helping teams uncover sensitive data they did not know existed.

The impact was especially clear for one telecommunications customer: "The accuracy of the LLMs in Cyera is impactful, along with the tuning and the speed with which it can scan... We scanned 128 TB in less than 24 hours while in production, in the middle of the week, with no performance hit on that database. Our previous solution would have taken three weeks to scan that same data, and our accuracy went up from 70% to about 95% with Cyera, previously we had to have someone manually check it."

Turn data intelligence into action

Finding sensitive data is only the first step. To reduce risk, teams need findings they can trust, with enough context to act without slowing the business down or breaking critical workflows. When findings are incomplete or disconnected, teams spend more time investigating than remediating, and real risk can stay buried under noisy alerts.

According to the IDC study, Cyera helped customers convert trusted data intelligence into faster action, generating 68% more actionable information, cutting the time needed to resolve or remediate alerts by 47%. For one insurance customer, that confidence showed up in fewer false positives and less time wasted on noise: "We went from 28K false positives to 0 with Cyera, false positives have been completely eliminated."

Build a safer foundation for AI

AI changes the risk equation because access and exposure matter more. AI tools and agents can inherit user permissions, surface sensitive data, and interact with enterprise systems. If sensitive data is publicly accessible, over-permissioned, or poorly understood, those existing risks can become AI risks.

The result, according to the IDC study: Cyera customers reduced over-permissioned access to sensitive data by 48% and reduced publicly accessible sensitive data by 78%. That reduction in exposure gave customers more confidence to expand AI use safely.

As one customer explained: "AI agents inherit permissions from the user, so reducing our overall access to sensitive data made us more confident rolling AI out to larger groups much more quickly."

A telecommunications customer tied that visibility directly to AI adoption: "We're more confident there's no leakage of bad data, so we're willing to deploy AI at scale."

Make data security a business accelerator

The IDC study reinforces what we hear from customers every day: data security is becoming a business accelerator. With faster, more accurate data intelligence, organizations can reduce risk, cut manual work, and adopt AI with greater confidence.

As one insurance customer told IDC: "We've been able to move forward with projects that have a bigger impact on revenue, even though they carry higher risk, because Cyera lets us properly manage, secure, and monitor how regulated data is used."

To learn more, download the IDC business value snapshot.

IDC Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Cyera, "The Business Value of Cyera," #US54797226, August 2026.