Walk into any modern business operation and you’ll see layers of protection. You’ll encounter firewalls, MFA, VPNs, DLP, endpoint detection, server hardening, SIEMs, offline backups, the works. Most companies have spent years building strong defenses.
But here’s the hard truth: Those layers aren’t enough anymore.
“We’ve built a lot of resiliency in cybersecurity—identity resiliency, endpoint resiliency, technology resiliency,” says Gary Clark, Principal Cybersecurity Consultant at Yearling Solutions. “But where we haven’t spent enough time is with data resiliency.”
That missing layer—protecting the data itself—is what’s leaving even well-funded security programs vulnerable.
The “Pre-Boom” Mindset
Clark uses a term that resonates with anyone who’s been through an incident response: pre-boom and post-boom.
- Pre-boom covers everything that happens before an attack: prevention, detection, and containment.
- Post-boom is what happens after the breach, when the attacker already has a stronghold and data begins to move out of the network.
“We’ve conditioned ourselves to think that if we implement all of the Pre-boom controls to protect the environment, we’ll have the resiliency we need to survive a ransomware attack,” Clark says.
But have we, as cybersecurity practitioners, been overly focused on building resilience around the controls protecting the crown jewels—instead of building resilience into the jewels themselves?
A simple analogy brings this into focus: banks didn’t stop robberies by reinforcing the glass. They added dye packs to the cash. Even if the money is stolen, it’s permanently marked—rendered useless to the thief.
It’s the same with data. Protecting the network and systems alone doesn’t guarantee protecting what’s inside.
Exfiltration Happens Faster Than Detection
Attackers don’t wait anymore. “Now as soon as they get an account, they’re exfiltrating data,” Clark explains. “You might be lucky if it’s a low-privilege account, but even then, they’re pulling internal data immediately and then moving to get more accounts and ultimately elevating to more privileged ones.”
The bottom line is that most breaches start with a legitimate username and password, either through an internal threat or through a classic phishing scam (the sort of email racket that’s only becoming more pervasive in B2B spaces).
Tools, like DLP and zero trust, can help reduce the blast radius, but none can stop exfiltration 100%. Once data leaves your network, it’s out of your hands unless you have data resilience.
What “Encryption Everywhere” Really Means
Encryption has been around for decades. But too often, it stops at the network boundary—protecting data at rest and in transit, but not in use.
Clark describes a more intelligent approach: “You have to understand the context of how the data is being used and whether it’s fallen into adverse hands. You don’t want to allow it to be unencrypted if it’s in the wrong place.”
That’s the core of file-centric encryption; each file carries its own logic. It knows who can open it, on what device, and under what conditions. If a file leaves your network or ends up on an unapproved device, it stays encrypted. Ciphertext. Unreadable. Even outright unusable, like the cash with the dye packs the thief stole from the bank in our earlier metaphor.
That capability, offered through solutions like FenixPyre, allows manufacturers to enforce “encryption everywhere,” a model where data protection travels with the file itself, not the network.
Encryption Everywhere: What It Looks Like in Practice
Manufacturing
From CAD designs to production schedules, manufacturing data moves constantly between plants, vendors, and design partners. A single compromised file can expose proprietary processes or customer information. With file-centric encryption, each file carries its own protection logic: It can only be opened by approved users, on approved devices, in approved locations. That means intellectual property stays safe, even when it travels far beyond the shop floor.
Health Care
Hospitals and labs exchange enormous volumes of patient data daily—test results, insurance records, diagnostic images. With file-centric encryption, every document carries its own protection. Even if it’s shared across systems or accessed on an unapproved device, the data remains encrypted and unreadable.
Finance
Trading firms, banks, and advisors all rely on shared documents full of sensitive client information. File-level encryption ensures that even if a user’s credentials are compromised, the underlying data stays secure. This protects not just the customer, but the firm’s reputation.
Aerospace + Defense
When engineering drawings or CAD files leave your organization, they shouldn’t lose their protection. File-centric encryption enforces access controls that travel with the data, so only approved users, devices, and locations can ever open it. Everyone else sees ciphertext.
Energy + Utilities
Operational data flows constantly between utilities, contractors, and regulators. File-level encryption gives these organizations the power to revoke access instantly, protecting critical infrastructure even if a partner or supplier suffers a breach.
Frictionless by Design
No cybersecurity strategy works if employees can’t do their jobs or customers can’t access services they’ve purchased.
“Users just want to do their work,” Clark says. “Cyber tools should be as frictionless as possible.”
In practice, that means embedding security quietly into normal workflows. A user should never have to change how they save, send, or access a file unless they’re breaking the rules. Then, and only then, the file simply won’t open.
That’s how file-centric encryption succeeds where traditional security fails: it makes protection invisible to users but absolute against adversaries.
The Bottom-Line Business Reality
For most businesses operating at the scale of the manufacturing industry or the health care space or other sprawling markets, the stakes are especially high. Intellectual property, equipment configurations, process documentation–all of it is valuable to competitors and attackers alike.
Even small and mid-sized companies can be targets.
As Clark puts it: “We’re all struggling with the same thing. Whether you have a lot of resources or just a few, focus on what the attacker actually want—your data and your operations. Build resilience into those two things and you’re in a much better place, no matter what your cybersecurity budget is.”
That’s the mindset shift Industry 4.0 demands: less focus on building higher walls, more focus on protecting what’s inside them.
Because at some point, your business’s digital environment probably will be breached. What happens next—whether your data is stolen or stays safe—depends on how ready you are for the post-boom.