In today’s business world, data and cybersecurity threats are always multiplying. Abhesh Kumar, chief technology officer of accounting at financial advisory firm Springline Advisory, sees one way to strengthen both a company’s use and understanding of data and its security: Having finance and data or technology leaders work together on it. I talked to him about why this is an important partnership and how to make it work.

This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. It was excerpted in the Forbes CFO newsletter.

What do you see as some of the biggest hazards in a company in terms of safeguarding their data?

Kumar: The short answer, the absolute biggest risk is lack of shared accountability, which arises from lack of shared visibility. But let me elaborate a little bit. We need to view the risk in the context of the fast-evolving threat landscape. So you’ve got different data assets—whether it’s financial data, strategic data, client data, employee data. Unfortunately, most organizations are operating in silos. That means CFOs do not really have full visibility on where the data lies, and they have not really incorporated protecting them or taking any cybersecurity measures as part of their financial risk management.

Because of this disconnect, and generally how the CIOs or CTOs and CFOs collaborate, this leads to the presence and increasing expansion of shadow data: Nobody knows where the data is or what kind of data it is, or how it can be tracked back to some of the crown jewels. The increasing diversity of data assets; the emerging sophistication of hackers; and the lack of proactive, collaborative, culturally driven operating models between the CTOs and [CFOs], they all contribute to the explosion in the risk exposure.

Springline Advisory CTO Abhesh Kumar.

You just talked about shadow data. Nobody knows where it is. What can this be attributed to and where does the problem stem from?

Traditionally, as organizations have evolved, data gets collected through business processes in the local neighborhood of the business department. So finance will have their data, HR will have their own data. Often, there is a lack of a coordinated approach to gaining the visibility of the data. The foundational missing piece here, which data-driven organizations are solving, is there different multiple versions of truth.

Organizations need to come together to build a data-driven organization, the foundation of which is to have a single version of truth. The data then seamlessly flows across business systems. When that happens, it gives joint visibility and accountability to data ownership and production across departments, and it elevates the visibility that parties have to the presence of data. This minimizes the blind spots around shadow data, because you are shining the light on multiple sources. You all are working together.

When you have new technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, they generate a lot of metadata that extracts from business data, but........

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