Why Focusing on Data Governance is Key for Retail Differentiation

Oct 28, 2025 | min read

Melissa Minkow

With 60% of retailers ramping up their AI investment, the value in collecting customer and product data has never been higher. But with much more data collection comes much more responsibility. In just the last six months, several top retailers across the US and UK have suffered from breaches, proving how many security challenges businesses face in today’s environment. Below are the top causes behind security risks, and how to avoid them, in order to ensure that your business and your customers are protected.

Backdoor and application vulnerabilities

Web application attacks are responsible for up to 26% of data breaches. The technology backbone behind a retailer's operation has to be absolutely airtight in order to protect against malicious attackers. Sophisticated AI tools, such as CI&T’s FLOW, can now help you fix vulnerabilities faster on your applications, thereby identifying potential risk exposure to hackers. The best offense is of course defense, and AI is the perfect solution here to deploy the most effective offense, eliminating application vulnerabilities faster and with less effort.

API attacks

Going a level deeper than attacking the holes within applications, malicious attacks on APIs are increasingly common. Because APIs are the “foundation of modern software development”, they’re constantly shuttling information between applications. As containers of vast amounts of data, they’re a prime target for exploitation. Once again, the best solution is to leverage an advanced AI tool to bulletproof APIs, closing any gaps that would create vulnerabilities to security breaches

Setting up for success

Arming retailers proactively against data breaches requires an ambidextrous team of professionals well-versed in both technology and business strategy. This way, security practices are intertwined with product and organisational goals to facilitate innovation rather than hinder it. CI&T’s approach to developing lasting security solutions for retailers is all-encompassing, scoring perfectly on SecurityScorecard.com’s Network Security, DNS Health, Patching Cadence, Endpoint Security, IP Reputation, and Application Security criteria. We are ISO 27.001 Certified, validating our compliance with international standards for data protection.

Our Process

While each retailer requires a custom programme, we have established a consistent framework that integrates security procedures into every step of the product lifecycle, ensuring ongoing safety. We begin the design sprint with a security requirements analysis, from which we design a secure architecture, conduct a threat modelling exercise, and then run the architecture through privacy and regulations testing. In the development sprint, we deploy static code security tests (SAST), software composition analysis (SCA), and dynamic code security tests (DAST) to evaluate applications iteratively. Before release, we launch a penetration test and implement continuous cloud security and vulnerability management to ensure a secure go-live and perpetual security coverage. If security measures are only part of one product development phase, vulnerability exposure will be high during any and all other times.

Further, security needs vary depending on which part of the product development life cycle engineers are in. Because security practices must be incorporated into all aspects of the business, clear, assigned ownership over response actions is crucial. Too often, roles and responsibilities are murky when rectifying data breaches, and, simultaneously, false positives end up being addressed in silos. The right team needs to be assigned, trained and given access to the necessary tools before any standard processes are established, while also consistently sharing context and communication across the organisation.

Efficiency is the last significant piece of the data security puzzle. Responding to data breaches, publicly facing or not, in an urgent manner is absolutely critical. Generative AI tools such as FLOW leverage automated workflows and secure-by-design components to accelerate remediation and reduce risk exposure. In a recent security project for an insurance company, CI&T fixed vulnerabilities 6 times faster.

A supportive organisational structure, an iterative approach, and an emphasis on speedy response time are the foundational principles upon which effective data governance rests. Data security must be a core part of every retail technology project to ensure innovation doesn’t compromise trust. Though technical in nature, this is what establishes outsourced work as truly strategic.