Metadata is critical to data protection, and where it needs to go next

Metadata is really just a fancy way of saying information about information. You interact with metadata all day even if you don’t realize it. Checking the day a photo was taken, updating who owns a shared file, even reading the title of a book, it’s all metadata: small bits of information that help us understand much larger things.

Why metadata matters more than you think

Imagine trying to work without it. You’d have to open every file to understand what’s inside, and there’s a lot of information you simply wouldn’t have. That’s why metadata is so critical to making data work within the enterprise, especially the 80% of data stored that is unstructured.

• It helps teams—and their applications—quickly understand and organize information held across the enterprise. The world would move too slowly without it.

• It powers every search engine you use, from files on your machine to Google.

• Metadata is crucial for making GenAI and LLMs effective, enhancing speed and improving the quality and relevance of results, particularly with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

• It’s also essential for governance, compliance, and security, giving teams and applications quick access to information like:

o   What format is the data?

o   Who owns it?

o   Where is it stored?

o   Who has access?

o   How sensitive is it?

When you stack it all up, metadata is what makes data protection possible at scale. Being able to track changes in that metadata is another fundamental security and compliance requirement—explainability. When auditors come, it’s the metadata that tells the story about your sensitive unstructured data and how you protect it.

Protecting sensitive unstructured data: metadata’s role in encryption operations

The ability to encrypt and decrypt is vital to protecting data while also keeping it useful (and valuable). The challenge is speed and scale. There’s simply too much data to organize and secure without help from digital tools, and metadata gives them all a common language to speak.

This has huge implications for managing data protection as part of overall governance and compliance strategy—that much sought-after single source of data integrity truth. But when you dig deeper into security operations, metadata also plays a crucial role in cryptographic operations.

When a file or document is encrypted, its metadata often contains critical information to support secure encryption workflows:

•  It may specify which cryptographic key was used, including key ID, type, algorithm, and length.

•  It can define how and when the key may be used, including permissions, expiry dates, and allowed operations.

•  It may store non-sensitive parameters required for decryption, such as IVs, nonces, salts, or key check values.

• It ensures a trusted link between the key and the data, sometimes cryptographically binding them to prevent tampering.

So, while the keys themselves aren’t stored in metadata, there is a lot of enabling architecture that is. As the challenges to traditional encryption evolve, so must our cryptographic defenses. One critical shift? The move to selective, object-based encryption.

Selective encryption: security built for modern data protection

Evolutions in technology, how we work, and the threats to both have exposed the limitations of traditional “big-blocky” encryption. It made selective sharing difficult and often forced organizations to create multiple redacted versions of the same document. The result? Increased storage, management overhead, and a higher risk of accidental data leaks.

Confidencial saw this future coming and set out to enable what’s next: selective encryption powered by advanced metadata management. Our platform enables organizations to secure information at the most granular level, embedding cryptographic access controls as metadata directly within the files and documents themselves.

Selective encryption meets the evolving needs of today’s organizations by allowing them to encrypt specific sections, paragraphs, or even individual data fields within a document. This approach uses metadata to embed cryptographic access controls directly into the data container, delivering a new level of data security and flexibility:

Granular policy enforcement: Different users can be granted access to different parts of the same document, all managed through metadata-driven policies.

Single-version collaboration: Organizations can maintain a single, authoritative document with embedded access rules, reducing complexity and risk.

Automated protection: AI and machine learning can analyze both content and metadata to identify and encrypt sensitive information at scale, eliminating the need for manual intervention.

Seamless integration: Selective encryption solutions can be embedded into common productivity tools and cloud platforms, making security transparent to end-users.

Protects the data and the format:  Embedding encryption the metadata means the original file format is preserved. No need to parse, translate, or edit the document to encrypt it, meaning your workflows don’t have to change either.

Metadata: foundational to the future of accessible, securable data

Metadata has always enabled data to be useful and protected. Now, as it evolves to power innovative solutions like selective encryption, that mission continues.  The goal is the same, even as modern, AI-first collaboration raises the stakes.