Published originally on January 27, 2026 by David Marshall on vmblog.
To mark Data Privacy Day 2026, VMblog reached out to leading voices across cybersecurity, compliance, and technology to share their perspectives on the current state of data privacy and what organizations should prioritize in the year ahead. The insights that follow offer a comprehensive look at the challenges, opportunities, and strategies that will define data protection in 2026 and beyond.
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Cody Pierce, Co-Founder and CEO, Neon Cyber
Data privacy breaks down through people, not systems. Attackers do not need to breach infrastructure when they can exploit trust and access a single individual’s browser session. With cloud and SaaS centralizing data, one compromised token can expose entire datasets in minutes. From a privacy standpoint, that makes human access the most critical control plane.
What leaders still underestimate is visibility. Security teams make risk decisions without understanding the context behind how data moves, where it goes, and why. That gap is widening as employees copy and paste sensitive information into third-party tools and AI platforms with little awareness of downstream use. Data Privacy Day is a reminder that privacy is not just a policy problem. It is a visibility and decision-speed problem, and without context, organizations cannot protect what matters most.
Read all the expert insights on vmblog.