What Does It Actually Mean to Lose Control of Your Data?

Most business leaders know data security matters. Fewer have stopped to ask where their data actually is right now — who holds it, who can access it, and what happens if that changes.

Dr. Eric Cole has spent more than 30 years helping organizations answer those questions under pressure. As Founder and CEO of Secure Anchor Consulting, he advises Fortune 500 companies, financial institutions, and government agencies on cybersecurity strategy. On this episode of Go Beyond the Connection, he joins host Steve MacDonald for one of the most direct, practically grounded conversations the show has produced.

The topic is data control in a wireless-first world — what the shift to cloud storage and always-on connectivity has actually done to the corporate security posture, and what leaders need to do differently as a result.

The Threat Has Already Moved On

For years, the default assumption was that a strong perimeter meant a secure network. Firewalls, wired infrastructure, servers locked in a data center. That model is gone for most organizations, and the threat landscape has shifted to match.

Eric explains that attackers are no longer primarily targeting individual companies. They are going after the providers — the wireless carriers, the cloud platforms, the software vendors whose tools sit inside thousands of organizations at once. The SolarWinds compromise is a clear example: attackers embedded a backdoor in a trusted software update and let the update process do the rest. CrowdStrike’s widespread outage demonstrated the same fragility from the opposite direction.

The implication for business leaders is significant. Securing your own environment is no longer sufficient if you have not also evaluated the security posture of every vendor and provider your organization depends on.

What You Will Hear in This Episode

• Why your data is almost certainly less protected than your bank account, and what that gap looks like in practice
• How AI tools like ChatGPT create a new category of data exposure that most security frameworks have not caught up with
• What “digital twin kidnapping” means and why it matters for executives who use AI regularly
• Why free apps are never actually free, and what they are collecting on your employees right now
• How a wireless-first network strategy creates shared risk across providers — and what encryption actually solves
• Why simplifying the number of devices and apps in your environment is a legitimate security strategy, not just a productivity preference

“Data keeps multiplying, and if we don’t control it, we can’t harness its power.” — Dr. Eric Cole

The Bigleaf Connection

The shift to wireless-first connectivity is not slowing down. Businesses are running distributed teams across multiple locations, relying on 4G, 5G, satellite, and a combination of ISP connections to stay operational. 

That is the environment Bigleaf is built for.

Bigleaf’s cloud-first SD-WAN gives IT teams intelligent, automatic failover across multiple connections — keeping applications running and traffic flowing regardless of which link is having a bad day. But connectivity without visibility is just speed without control. What Eric describes in this episode — the need for real-time awareness of what is on your network, what vendors you are trusting, and how your data is moving — maps directly to what Bigleaf is designed to help you see and manage.

The conversation is a useful reminder that resilient connectivity and sound security strategy are not separate conversations. They belong in the same room.