---
title: "The Race to Embrace AI: How Data Protection Supports Sovereignty and Growth"
description: Explore how businesses can safely harness AI and cloud technology while addressing data security and sovereignty challenges to drive growth and innovation.
---

[Blog | comforte](https://insights.comforte.com)

# [The Race to Embrace AI: How Data Protection Supports Sovereignty and Growth](https://insights.comforte.com/the-race-to-embrace-ai-how-data-protection-supports-sovereignty-and-growth)

 Written by [Erfan Shadabi](https://insights.comforte.com/author/erfan-shadabi) | Oct 1, 2026

Business leaders have had a tough few years. From geopolitical uncertainty to trade tensions and stubbornly high interest rates, every quarter seems to bring with it new challenges. So they can be forgiven for racing to embrace cloud and AI to give them an advantage. According to [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai), 88% are now using the technology in at least one function, up 10 percentage points in a year. Two-thirds (64%) claim it is already boosting innovation. Yet two significant barriers exist.

The first is security. How can organizations be assured the data they use to train and populate AI systems will maintain its confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA)? The second is sovereignty — an increasingly important concept promoted by businesses and regulators to allay concerns over control, residency and compliance.

In this fast-moving landscape, organizations need the surety that comes from protecting data throughout its lifecycle without compromising on utility or sovereignty.

## AI Arms Attackers and Defenders

As organizations look to cloud and AI-centric investments to make better decisions, improve efficiencies and transform customer experiences, they have two big security challenges. Both are AI related.

First, AI is making the attack surface more expansive as companies adopt LLMs and agentic systems, and use the technology in developer and SaaS tools. This provides threat actors with new opportunities to poison models, manipulate business processes, steal valuable training data, and even deploy ransomware.

“In 2025, adversaries exploited legitimate GenAI tools at more than 90 organizations by injecting malicious prompts to generate commands for stealing credentials and cryptocurrency,” says [CrowdStrike.](https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/crowdstrike-2026-global-threat-report-findings/) “They also exploited vulnerabilities in AI development platforms to establish persistence and deploy ransomware, and published malicious AI servers impersonating trusted services to intercept sensitive data.”

Second, AI itself is being used to accelerate and improve these and other attacks. It can help threat actors with reconnaissance, by identifying high-value targets and drafting convincing social engineering lures. And then it can rapidly identify and exploit vulnerabilities for access and privilege escalation, automate lateral movement, and speed up exfiltration.

According to [ReliaQuest](https://reliaquest.com/campaigns/annual-threat-report-2026/executive-summary-2025-vs-2024-at-a-glance#introduction-4-minute-warning-speed-wins-when-identity-fails), breakout time in 2025 took on average just 34 minutes; 29% quicker than the year before. The fastest ever recorded time taken from access to lateral movement was just four minutes — 85% faster than the year before. And the fastest recorded exfiltration time was just six minutes; down from 4 hours 29 minutes in 2024. CrowdStrike has observed one attack where breakout time was just 27 seconds.

## Sovereignty Is a Growing Barrier

These threat landscape trends make a robust data protection strategy essential for the AI-centric organization. Without assurances around that critical CIA triad, security and compliance teams may halt projects. And if they don’t get there in time, a major security breach incident might. But this isn’t the only barrier to AI adoption.

[Separate research](https://ir.arqit.uk/news-events/press-releases/detail/123/62-of-respondents-cite-data-sovereignty-and-privacy-risks-as-the-biggest-factor-slowing-ai-projects-in-the-public-cloud) reveals that 62% of organizations now cite data sovereignty and privacy risks as the biggest factor slowing AI projects when using a public cloud. The issue has taken on a whole new dimension in Europe, given recent geopolitical developments. Sovereignty means more than residency today. Even with data stored locally, concerns are growing that under external laws like the US CLOUD Act, providers may be compelled to provide foreign authorities with access to clients’ data.

This is where [confidential computing](https://confidentialcomputing.io/about/) comes in. Rather than protect data at rest or in motion, it protects data in use, at a chip level, by isolating it in a specific area of the hardware where it’s processed. Sometimes called Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), these enclaves ensure the data is protected, even if the underlying OS is compromised. It means that, theoretically, even if an organization’s data was processed abroad on a third-party cloud provider’s infrastructure, they could still meet strict sovereignty requirements. Confidential computing could play an increasing important role as regulators redesign laws for a new era of data sovereignty.

## TAMUNIO Brings It All Together

So what happens next? With comforte TAMUNIO, organizations have a single platform to accelerate their AI journey with confidence, meeting strict data protection and sovereignty requirements. [It offers](https://www.comforte.com/solutions/enable-safe-ai-and-analytics):

- **Discovery and classification:** Uses AI to help identify sensitive data elements across the enterprise environment, from warehouses to prompts
- **Protection at source:** Applies strong data protection to ensuresensitive data is scrambled before it is shared or moved, eliminating plain text exposure
- **Data utility:** Tokenization enables analytics, machine learning and AI to operate on substitute “tokens” while the original data stay tightly governed and secured
- **Confidential computing:** To support sovereignty requirements and protect data when plain text is required for limited use cases (e.g. model training)
- **Unified visibility and management:** A single pane of glass for monitoring, auditing and management

With comforte TAMUNIO, organizations can maximize their data use in AI, cloud and analytics systems, to see more and make better decisions. And they can do so while adhering to strict security, compliance and sovereignty requirements. By accelerating AI safely in this way, they’re on the fast track to sustainable growth.

[View full post](https://insights.comforte.com/the-race-to-embrace-ai-how-data-protection-supports-sovereignty-and-growth)

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