ICYMI: The 5 Best Moments at AWARE Spring 2026

The Forcepoint AWARE Spring 2026 virtual event featured global CISOs, security practitioners, industry analysts and customers to tackle a challenge reshaping every organization's security posture: AI has fundamentally changed how data behaves, and the tools built to protect it haven't kept pace.

Across five sessions, one theme emerged with clarity. The gap between seeing risk and stopping it is no longer an inconvenience. In the age of always-on, AI-driven data, it's an existential threat. Here are the five most important takeaways every security professional needs to hear.

1. Seeing Risk Is Not the Same as Stopping It

Ryan Windham, CEO of Forcepoint, opened the event by reframing a challenge most security leaders feel but struggle to articulate:

Visibility without action isn't protection, and action without understanding isn't either. In fact, that's dangerous.

The world that legacy security was built for no longer exists. AI generates data continuously, rewrites it, summarizes it and spreads it across SaaS apps and automated workflows instantly. The old assumptions — pre-assign access, classify once, enforce with static rules — have all broken down at the same time.

What replaces them is a single continuous loop built to identify risk, then act on it instantly. That's the foundation of Self-Aware Data Security. And it's exactly what Forcepoint Data Security Cloud delivers: unified visibility and control in a single platform.

2. Meet ARIA: Your Always-On AI Assistant

Naveen Palavalli, Chief Product Officer, and Bakshi Kohli, CTO, moved from vision to reality with live demonstrations of how Forcepoint Data Security Cloud responds to insider risk across every channel simultaneously. Naveen described what security teams have been asking for:

Imagine having a trusted advisor that's awake 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It knows your environment, monitors every incident and proactively recommends what to do next without waiting to be asked.

That advisor is now real. ARIA, the new Adaptive Risk Intelligence Assistant embedded in Forcepoint Data Security Cloud, analyzes activity and policy coverage, identifies protection gaps and translates risk signals across platform solutions into recommended, deployable policies in seconds, enforced through Forcepoint's industry-leading DLP engine.  

The session also introduced the next-generation Data Security Everywhere (DSE) agent, enabling flexible deployment options based on organizational needs and unified identity integration across Active Directory so policies extend automatically as users and groups change. With the DSE agent, Forcepoint Web Intelligence brings adaptive enforcement directly to the endpoint without relying on traditional proxy architectures.  

Together, ARIA and the DSE agent enforce consistent protection across endpoint, AI workflows, web, SaaS and email, adapting in real time as risk changes.

3. The Data Foundation Has to Come First

Brian Johnson, Director of IT Security at Liberty University, and Ronan Murphy, Chief Data Strategy Officer at Forcepoint, brought the stakes into focus with a candid conversation about securing data at scale. Ronan put it plainly:

You're only one prompt away from a potential breach.

Unlike a single employee accidentally emailing the wrong file, an LLM with unrestricted access to your data can consume everything in seconds. CRM records, financial data, PII, intellectual property — gone before anyone can intervene.

Brian's experience at Liberty University, with over 100,000 students operating across every time zone, shows what investing early in data visibility and classification makes possible. Security becomes a business enabler rather than a blocker. The lesson: build the foundation before AI arrives, not after.

4. Getting Ahead of the People Problem

Forrester Principal Analyst Heidi Shey delivered one of the event's most memorable moments with an analogy that resonated across attendants:

Your (AI) copilots are like toddlers — unless you do some type of toddler proofing, they're going to be grabbing whatever they can off the shelf.

Copilots and AI agents don't exercise judgment. They surface whatever they can access. Without proper data discovery, classification and protection, the copilot becomes a liability.

But Heidi's sharpest insight was about people, not technology. Nearly a third of organizations have no AI usage policies in place. Forrester's research shows meaningful AI enablement requires at least 10 to 15 hours of training plus ongoing support, not the one-hour sessions most organizations currently offer. The technology is advancing. The people strategy needs to catch up.

5. Moving from Noise to Signal to Action

Eva Klein, Forcepoint Chief Customer Officer, closed the event with a message that was consistent across every customer conversation she described:

Detection without context is just noise —no signal —and visibility without enforcement is just seeing the problem, not addressing it.

Customers aren't short on ambition. What they lack is confidence that moving fast won't mean losing control of their data. That confidence comes from a foundation that connects understanding to enforcement and adapts as risk changes. Organizations like Mariner Finance, who invested in tuning policies within Data Security Cloud, found the payoff significant. That's the shift ARIA will help accelerate, moving organizations from reactive to ready, from chasing alerts to acting with confidence.

The Foundation Is Set. Now It's Time to Move.

The message across every session at AWARE Spring 2026 was clear: the visibility-control gap is real, it's widening and it demands a response that moves at the speed of the data itself.

Self-Aware Data Security is how Forcepoint closes that gap. Discovery, classification, prioritization, remediation, and adaptive enforcement work together in a single continuous loop. ARIA operates as an always-on intelligence layer across that loop. The result: organizations know where their data resides, can adapt the moment risk changes and protect what matters most before exposure becomes impact.  

AI is moving fast. And in this new era, data protection isn't one layer of security among many — it's the foundation everything else is built on. If you're ready to act, Forcepoint is ready to help.

Watch all Forcepoint AWARE Spring 2026 sessions on demand at Forcepoint.com/aware. Or join us at RSA Conference, March 23–26, for hands-on demos and direct access to Forcepoint leadership.