Every modern organization handles personally identifiable information (PII) in at least one form, whether it’s employee records, customer account data, or login credentials.
As your business network expands across cloud platforms, remote devices, contractors, and SaaS tools, PII moves through more systems, more workflows, and more hands. That makes privacy and security not just legal obligations but operational priorities.
PII risks and responsibilities can’t be put on the backburner. In 2025, IBM found that the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.4 million(nové okno), up 10% from the previous year and the largest increase since the pandemic. Verizon’s 2025 breach data adds important context: 60% of breaches involved a human element, such as weak credential practices, poor access management, and careless mistakes that create serious business risk.
In other words, weak controls around PII can quickly become a board-level issue involving revenue loss, legal exposure, customer churn, and reputational damage.
This article explains what PII means in the modern business environment, why it creates concentrated risk, what responsibilities organizations carry, and which practices most effectively reduce exposure. We’ll also look at what enterprise tools organizations can use to support stronger access control and credential hygiene as part of a broader privacy and security strategy.
What is PII data and why does it matter to businesses?
Why organizations should care about PII
The risks associated with PII in digital environments
The organizational responsibilities of handling PII
Security practices that protect PII
How Proton Pass for Business supports PII protection
What is PII data and why does it matter to businesses?
Personally identifiable information, or PII, is any information that can identify a specific individual directly or indirectly. That includes obvious identifiers such as full names, passport numbers, Social Security numbers, and payment card details.
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), PII data may be broadly defined as information that can distinguish or trace an individual’s identity, either on its own or when linked with other data. NIST’s definition also explicitly includes information that is “linked or linkable” to a person. This is important to note for modern digital systems, where identity is often inferred across datasets rather than exposed in one field.
Less obviously, PII also includes information that becomes identifying in context, such as device IDs, IP addresses, location history, login credentials, or combinations of otherwise ordinary data points. A mother’s maiden name or home address may appear benign in isolation, but combined with a date of birth or account number, these data points can be sufficient to verify identity, circumvent security controls, or enable fraudulent activity. PII is not limited to government IDs or financial data; it can also include the digital breadcrumbs that make it possible to track someone online.
In modern data privacy and cybersecurity programs, PII is treated as highly sensitive because unauthorized access or disclosure can lead to identity theft, fraud, and regulatory violations. An email address in a CRM, an employee’s home address in payroll, a browser identifier tied to user behavior, or a support note that includes account history can all qualify as sensitive personal data in the right context. Protecting PII requires strong access controls, encryption, and clear policies governing how personal information is collected, stored, and shared.
Why organizations should care about PII
PII sits at the intersection between privacy, security, compliance, and trust. If an organization can’t protect the data that identifies its customers, employees, or partners, it isn’t just facing a technical weakness. It is facing a governance and compliance problem.
That is especially relevant in distributed environments. Cloud applications, remote work, shared devices, contractors, and third-party vendors all expand the number of points from which PII can be accessed, duplicated, or exposed.
Guidance from the European Data Protection Board (EPDB) emphasizes a similar principle: organizations must understand what personal data they process, where it’s stored and where it could move within the network, and who has access to it in order to meet accountability requirements under GDPR. That sounds straightforward, but in practice this is where many businesses fall short.
PII protection also has direct commercial value to your business: your customers and clients expect you to demonstrate how personal data is secured in practice, while regulators require documented controls, audit trails, and verifiable enforcement.
Similarly, employees expect responsible handling of HR and payroll data, and customers expect that privacy promises made in marketing and legal notices are backed by real operational safeguards.
Overall, strong PII governance supports compliance, simplifies procurement by addressing vendor risk assessments and due diligence requirements, improves customer retention, and strengthens brand credibility.
The risks associated with PII in digital environments
No matter the industry your organization operates in, the main risks around PII now stem from a combination of scale, sprawl, and credential weaknesses. Most organizations use dozens or hundreds of digital services, and each one creates another access point from which personal data might be stored, viewed, exported, or shared.
According to Verizon’s 2025 DBIR, the primary hacking variety for both SMBs and large organizations is the use of stolen credentials, at 32% in large organizations and 33% in SMBs. Leveraging stolen credentials has been one of the most common ways into an organization for the last several years, which reinforces a familiar lesson about maintaining strict access control to sensitive business, employees, and customers.
In fact, recent findings from Proton’s Data Breach Observatory highlight just how consistently personal data is exposed in real-world incidents. Names and email addresses appear in nearly 9 out of 10 breaches, making them the most commonly compromised data points. Contact information, such as phone numbers and physical addresses, is exposed in 75% of breaches, while passwords are involved in 47% of incidents.
These figures reinforce a critical reality for organizations, revealing that even seemingly “low-risk” data points can become high-risk when aggregated or reused across systems.
The report also illustrates how attackers combine information to increase impact. In 42% of breaches, both a person’s name and physical address are exposed together. This combination is particularly valuable for identity theft and targeted scams. Meanwhile, highly sensitive data such as government-issued IDs, health records, and other personal identifiers appears in 37% of incidents, with financial information exposed around 5% of the time.
Common threats to personal data
The most common causes of PII exposure are well known, but that does not make them less damaging. They include external attacks such as phishing, credential stuffing, ransomware, and business email compromise.
Business email compromise (BEC) is a sophisticated, highly targeted cybercrime where attackers impersonate executives, employees, or trusted vendors via email to trick victims into wiring funds or revealing sensitive data, making it one of the most sophisticated ways of exploiting systems vulnerabilities.
It’s easy to see how personal vulnerabilities can become organizational attack surfaces. These threats typically exploit individual-level weaknesses, such as lax permissions, shared credentials, inconsistent offboarding practices, and the use of shadow IT tools for data storage. Each of these threats represents a potential entry point that bad actors are well-positioned to identify and exploit.
This is consistent with the 2025 DBIR, which found the human element was involved in 60% of breaches. Mistakes are unavoidable, so organizations need systems that assume people will make mistakes and that reduce the blast radius when they do.
Similarly, device loss and poor decommissioning protocols are significant threats to PII data exposure. ENISA notes that personal information is frequently put at risk when businesses fail to secure laptops, backup media, or portable storage. It’s especially vulnerable when data is moving outside controlled environments, such as on employee-owned devices under a bring your own device (BYOD) scheme. You should securely wipe, destroy, or decommission hardware such as laptops, backup drives, or USB devices before reuse or disposal, because these devices may leave residual data accessible to unauthorized parties.
This is part of the GDPR framework, which requires organizations to manage the full lifecycle of personal data, including storage, transfer, and disposal, as part of their security obligations. Without clear processes for device tracking, secure deletion, and asset management, businesses can unintentionally create data breach pathways that are difficult to detect and even harder to remediate, particularly in hybrid work environments where endpoints are widely distributed.
Consequences of exposure
When organizations fail to protect PII, the consequences often escalate quickly. A single data breach can expose thousands, or even millions, of personal records, triggering regulatory investigations, financial penalties, and reputational damage.
For the organization, the fallout often spreads across several functions at once:
- Incident response
- Legal review
- Customer communications
- Vendor management
- Cyber insurance
- Regulatory reporting
- Remediation
The costs are rarely limited to forensics and notifications. Research from the Ponemon Institute shows that insider-related incidents cost organizations an average of over $17 million annually, reflecting the full lifecycle of detection, investigation, containment, and recovery.
These figures show that breach costs are driven as much by operational disruption, legal exposure, and lost business as they are by incident response itself.
Malicious insider incidents, where employees, contractors, or partners intentionally misuse legitimate access to systems or data, are particularly costly. Unlike external attacks, these incidents often bypass perimeter defenses entirely, making them harder to detect and more damaging once data is exposed. Insider threats can also include negligent actions, such as mishandling credentials or unintentionally exposing data, which account for a significant share of real-world breaches.
This is why data protection as a whole, and PII security in particular, needs to be treated as an ongoing business discipline rather than a reactive compliance exercise. Today’s biggest cybersecurity threats — phishing, weak passwords, ransomware, and social engineering — are common because they exploit operational gaps, not just software bugs.
The organizational responsibilities of handling PII
Organizations which collect or process PII are expected to do more than just avoiding obvious negligence. They are expected to establish clear rules for collection, access, retention, protection, and response.
Legal and regulatory obligations
The exact legal standard depends on the jurisdiction and sector, but the core responsibilities are consistent:
- As a business, you should collect only the PII you need.
- Explain why you are collecting it and why you’re using it.
- Restrict PII data access to authorized personnel.
- Protect PII with technical and organizational safeguards.
- Respond appropriately if PII is compromised.
International data protection laws, including the GDPR framework, emphasizes data mapping, access review, minimization, and secure disposal as foundational requirements for responsible data governance. This also means that most business processes fall within the scope of PII regulations, as they all handle potentially sensitive information in one way or another.
Even for small and mid-sized businesses with limited resources, these obligations can add up quickly. They may need to meet GDPR and local privacy requirements, in addition to meeting security expectations from partners and customers. Building a simple, scalable privacy program helps address these overlapping demands without adding unnecessary complexity.
Proton for Business gives business owners and managers the right encrypted solutions, tools and resources to help them navigate these overlapping requirements, providing practical safeguards that strengthen control over sensitive data without adding unnecessary complexity.
Transparency and accountability
PII governance also depends on being able to explain what is happening inside your organization. That includes clear privacy notices, documented retention rules, access logs, vendor oversight, and evidence that policies are actually enforced.
As such, internal accountability is important. Every organization should know who owns privacy decisions, who approves access to sensitive data, who reviews incidents, and who is responsible for offboarding users and vendors. Without named responsibility, access creep and shadow processes tend to fill the gap.
Security practices that protect PII
Protecting PII requires layered controls, not a single product or policy. The most resilient programs combine minimization, encryption, access governance, employee training, monitoring, and disciplined incident response.
Data minimization and classification
The first control is the least glamorous and one of the most effective: keep less sensitive data in your organization. The FTC advises businesses to inventory personal information and scale down what they retain. If the data is not necessary for the business purpose, it should not be collected.
Classification strengthens that process. Not all PII carries the same risk. Payroll records, customer financial details, health information, and credential stores should not be handled with the same assumptions as marketing preference data. Classification helps organizations match controls to impact.
Encryption and access control
Encryption should protect PII both at rest and in transit. But encryption alone is not enough if access is overbroad or credentials are weak. Organizations also need a least-privilege model, regular access reviews, controlled credential sharing, rotating credentials for sensitive systems, and fast revocation when roles change.
This is especially important because modern breaches often begin with valid credentials rather than brute-force intrusion. If the wrong person can log in successfully, encryption on the storage layer won’t stop the compromise.
Strong authentication and password habits
Credential hygiene remains one of the highest-leverage controls available to most organizations. Strong and unique passwords with two-factor authentication (2FA), password health monitoring, and secure sharing policies simultaneously address the most common security issues. Proton Pass for Business, a secure business password manager, supports that model with end-to-end encrypted password storage, a built-in 2FA authenticator, password health checks, dark web monitoring, and team policies that let administrators enforce best practices at scale.
That matters because secure defaults consistently outperform policy reminders. If employees are expected to remember and manage complex credentials manually, then reuse, insecure sharing, and unsafe storage inevitably creep in. By contrast, tools like Proton Pass for Business embed secure practices directly into daily workflows by generating strong, unique passwords automatically, storing them with end-to-end encryption, and enabling secure sharing that doesn’t expose the credentials.
Monitoring, alerts, and testing
When it comes to monitoring access to sensitive PII data, businesses rely on controls such as audit logs, unusual activity alerts, failed login tracking, and regular reviews of privileged access. Proton Pass for Business supports these practices with detailed activity logs, usage reporting, and IP-based visibility, enabling stronger operational oversight while simplifying audit preparation and compliance reporting.
Controls should also be regularly tested. Tabletop exercises, access reviews, penetration testing, and incident simulations help you ensure that your policies are effective in real-world scenarios, not just documented on paper.
Employee training and workplace culture
Security awareness still matters because many incidents begin with phishing, credential theft, or unsafe data handling by legitimate users. Proton’s cybersecurity guide argues for repeatable policies, anti-phishing habits, and security-conscious routines rather than one-off annual reminders.
A strong security culture doesn’t mean telling employees to be more careful. It means making the secure path the easy path. That includes approved tools, clear escalation channels, simple policies for sharing access, and practical training grounded in real scenarios.
Data retention, secure deletion, vendor management, and incident response
Retention is a security issue, not just a records issue. The longer PII is kept, the more systems it reaches and the more value it offers attackers. That’s because, over time, personal data will be duplicated into backups, analytics platforms, third-party tools, and employee devices, expanding the number of potential access points. This increases the attack surface and also makes it harder for organizations to track, secure, and delete that data in a controlled way.
As such, businesses should define retention windows and secure deletion processes for both live systems and backups.
Vendor management belongs in the same discussion. Service providers frequently touch payroll data, analytics identifiers, support records, and authentication data. Contracts should cover data protection expectations, and access should be limited and reviewable.
Finally, every organization that handles PII needs a documented incident response plan. The GDPR breach response guidelines(nové okno) stress rapid notification to affected businesses and institutions where appropriate, along with containment and recovery steps. Speed matters, but so does preparation.
As a business owner or manager, you should have strict policies on how to store PII data in a database securely. This typically involves a layered approach that includes encryption at rest, strong credential management, strict access controls, audit logging, and regular monitoring of database activity.
How Proton Pass for Business supports PII protection
PII security programs succeed when they reduce real exposure without slowing teams down, when cybersecurity is part of your security and privacy culture rather than an afterthought. That is where a business password manager can play a meaningful role, especially because credentials protect the gateways to HR systems, finance tools, CRMs, support platforms, developer infrastructure, and cloud storage.
Proton Pass for Business is built around several controls that are directly relevant to PII protection. Proton Pass works on zero-knowledge, end-to-end encryption for passwords, passkeys, credit cards, notes, and metadata, so even sensitive fields such as usernames and website URLs are encrypted. It is also protected by Swiss privacy law and supported by an open-source, independently audited model.
From an operational perspective, the business offering adds centralized administration, audit logs, password health checks, dark web monitoring, secure vault and item sharing, and team policies, and SSO and SCIM support for enterprise environments. Proton Pass for Business supports organizations not just with personal password storage, but with company-wide access governance.
Strong credential security practices is one of the best ways to reduce PII exposure. When teams can generate and store unique credentials, share them securely with autofill capability, monitor for weak or reused passwords, and revoke access quickly during offboarding, they reduce the odds that a credential issue becomes a privacy incident.
Proton Pass for business offers central admin oversight, policy enforcement, secure sharing, and visibility into changes and events. Proton Pass can also support broader anti-phishing and identity-protection practices. For example, hide-my-email aliases can help users limit exposure of their real addresses, which can reduce spam and phishing pressure in some workflows.
For organizations dealing with customer support, testing accounts, and role-based signups, that can be useful as part of a larger identity hygiene strategy.
However, no password manager, including Proton Pass, solves PII protection on its own. A password manager won’t replace data mapping, retention policies, DLP, endpoint security, or legal compliance work. But it can reduce one of the most common pathways to PII compromise: inconsistent credential handling across people, apps, and teams.
Frequently asked questions about PII
What is personally identifiable information (PII)?
PII is information that can identify a person directly or indirectly. NIST defines it as information that can distinguish or trace an individual’s identity, either alone or when combined with other linked data. That can include names, government IDs, account credentials, financial details, IP addresses, location data, and other identifiers depending on context.
In the context of modern compliance frameworks, organizations often ask what is PII in data privacy programs. In simple terms, PII refers to any information that can identify an individual directly or indirectly when combined with other data.
Regulatory definitions also vary slightly across jurisdictions. For example, organizations frequently ask what is PII data in the UK, where UK GDPR considers identifiers such as IP addresses, location data, and device identifiers to be personal data if they can be linked to an individual.
Why is protecting PII important for businesses?
Because PII exposure can trigger fraud, identity theft, legal obligations, customer notifications, reputational damage, and major financial losses. Recent breach reporting and cost data show that the scale and business impact of privacy incidents are significant.
How can organizations secure PII data more effectively?
The strongest approach is layered: collect less data, classify what you keep, encrypt it, restrict access, enforce strong authentication, train employees, monitor for suspicious activity, review vendors, and maintain a tested incident response plan. FTC guidance specifically emphasizes knowing what data you have, where it flows, and who can access it.
What are the biggest risks of PII exposure today?
The biggest risks include phishing, credential theft, ransomware, insider misuse, accounts with too much access, weak offboarding, lost devices, and third-party exposure. Verizon’s DBIR reporting and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse breach analysis both show that credential abuse and service-provider risk remain major factors in modern incidents.
What are third-party or supply chain incidents in cybersecurity?
Third-party or supply chain incidents occur when a security breach originates not within your own systems, but through a vendor, service provider, or external partner that has access to your data or infrastructure. Modern businesses rely heavily on cloud services, SaaS platforms, and external tools, which is why these incidents are increasingly common. If a vendor managing your credentials, analytics, or communications systems is compromised, attackers may gain indirect access to your organization’s data.
What role does a password manager play in protecting PII data?
A business password manager helps protect access to the systems where PII is stored by generating strong unique credentials, storing them securely, enabling controlled sharing, and improving visibility into access activity.
Business password managers are especially useful for reducing password reuse, securing shared accounts, and supporting onboarding and offboarding workflows. Proton Pass for Business adds end-to-end encryption, password health checks, audit logs, and centralized admin controls to support those goals.
